Acquah, who bought a 2024 Tesla Model Y, shares a frustration many owners of electric vehicles (EVs) in Alberta feel: they live in one of only two provinces in the country—the other is Saskatchewan—in which you’re taxed for simply owning a zero-emissions vehicle.

It’s not so much the existence of the tax that annoys Acquah and other EV owners. Instead, they say it’s a symptom of a larger anti-electric-car attitude in Alberta’s UCP government, which is actively stifling local EV adoption. The effort is marked by heated rhetoric by conservatives who see the vehicles as part of a Liberal anti-oil conspiracy. Federal Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre, for example, once claimed an EV sales mandate would be akin to “banning the rural way of life.” Danielle Smith called federal EV adoption targets “environmental extremism.”

But if the UCP is hostile to EVs, they’re swimming against a global tide. One in four new cars sold around the world in 2025 were electric. Some 20 million EVs were sold globally that year. In China fully half of new cars are EVs. Alberta lags far behind not only that rate but even other Canadian provinces. BC has 195,000 registered EVs on the road, for example, nearly 10 times Alberta’s meagre total of 20,000.

EVs remain polarizing in Alberta, says Andrew Batiuk, president of the Electric Vehicle Association of Alberta (EVAA), where they pit environmentalists and tech fans against supporters of oil and gas who perceive a threat to the province’s economy. As the naysayers see it, the more EVs there are, the less fossil fuel that gets burned. And that’s a sore spot for Albertans who rely on oil and gas for their livelihoods. That’s partly why the province aggressively opposed the Electric Vehicle Availability Standard—the so-called EV sales mandate—that Justin Trudeau’s government introduced in December 2023 to reduce air pollution and fight climate change. Prime Minister Mark Carney has since cancelled the mandate.

Opponents aren’t wrong that the cars reduce the world’s demand for oil. It’s estimated that EVs already displace somewhere between 1.3 and 1.8 million barrels per day of oil consumption. That’s a fraction of the over 100 million barrels of oil currently being burned daily. Nonetheless, the trend has been noticed in the oil industry, which provides 144,000 jobs in Alberta. It also threatens a government that relies on that industry. Alberta is projecting $13.2-billion in non-renewable resource revenues in 2026/2027, 18 per cent of its total revenue.

All of this biases our government against EVs. Premier Smith has even gone so far as to aggressively promote the production of so-called blue hydrogen from natural gas for use in hydrogen-powered vehicles. Across the world, sales of these rivals to EVs are faltering. The cars are virtually absent from Alberta. The province’s only public hydrogen refuelling station, at Blackjacks Roadhouse in Nisku, which Smith’s government helped fund, closed down permanently in early 2025.

The economic impact of oil and gas gives the industry an outsized influence on provincial policy. Charges Daniel Breton, president of Electric Mobility Canada: “I see the premier of Alberta more or less as a puppet of the oil and gas industry, and her government as well.”

But for all of this hostility, EVs may yet prevail—even in Alberta.

Anti-EV campaigners often draw on outdated anecdotes and at times deliberate misinformation. One favourite claim is that EVs—with their multiple battery packs—are worse for the environment than gas-powered vehicles. Initially, an EV does indeed have a higher carbon footprint, Batiuk says. Making the batteries is energy intensive and requires rare-earth minerals. But the gap with gas-powered vehicles evens out within one to two years of ownership, depending on distance driven. After that, the carbon footprint of an EV becomes substantially smaller, especially since Alberta has converted its electricity generation from primarily coal-fired plants to natural gas, solar and wind.

The EVs-are-worse argument has been debunked by no less than the Trump-era Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), whose website announces: “FACT: Electric vehicles typically have a smaller carbon footprint than gasoline cars, even when accounting for the electricity used for charging, plus they are far more efficient when it comes to energy use.”

Other biases are almost comical. Angie Dean, president of the Tesla Owners Club of Alberta, says someone once asked her if it was OK to wash her electric car.

Ironically, the people who make and sell EVs don’t always help. “Misinformation is a huge problem, even when it comes to car manufacturers,” says Electric Mobility’s Breton. He argues some manufacturers are “spreading crap” about EVs—even their own models—because they don’t particularly want to build the vehicles, or are frustrated by “unrealistic” government EV sales mandates. The “green halo” effect of having an EV in, say, Ford’s lineup might be good for the company’s marketing image. But EVs are costlier to make, and many, such as the F-150 Lightning, are sold at a loss. (Ford recently announced it is ending production of the truck.)

Anti-EV campaigners often draw on outdated anecdotes and deliberate misinformation.

Dealers sometimes discourage buyers from choosing EVs. Doug Green, dealer principal of High Country Chevrolet Buick GMC in High River, says he invested $250,000 in equipment upgrades at the dealership to service EVs at the urging of GM, but he has sold only three of the vehicles, at a net loss of $10,000. “I was so happy to be rid of those,” he says. He also paid $6,000 to ship three additional unsold EVs to dealers in Quebec. Green says one customer in town bought a Blazer EV, only to discover she’d have to shell out $3,000 to install curbside charging from her duplex, which doesn’t have a garage. “She was unprepared,” Green said. Meanwhile, he says, the only public EV-charging station in town was out of commission. Chargers have since been added at the Ford and Chrysler dealerships.

Angie Dean wasn’t surprised to hear of the GMC dealer’s attitude. “I’ve heard so many stories from people who have gone into car dealerships and been excited about an electric car and [are told], ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about. Let me show you this gas car here.’”

And then there’s the myth that EVs don’t work in cold weather. Green claims an electric SUV with a rated 500-km range is really only capable of travelling 300 km, because you shouldn’t fully charge the battery. And, he contends, it will suffer dramatic power losses in the cold. “If you drive in the wintertime, and you put winter tires on, then it’s going to go in half,” he says. “If it’s cold out, then it’s going to go in half again, and if there’s snow then it’s going to go in half again.”

Dean scoffs at Green’s doomerism. She said her Tesla Model Y might lose 40 per cent of its range when the temperature hits minus 40, but that’s “extremely uncommon.” In Calgary’s more typical winter temperatures, she says she sees an estimated 15–20 per cent loss of range. Yet some people just don’t believe her. She recalls an incident in February 2025 when she parked at a local Home Depot. “This guy walks up to me and says, ‘You know those things don’t work here in the winter.’ And I was, like, I’m right here! Do you think I just pushed the car here?”

Dean’s experience reflects research by Recurrent, a US-based organization that tracks EV performance. The study, conducted during the winter of 2025–26, analyzed data from more than 30,000 vehicles across 34 models from 13 automakers. Although performance varied by make, the study found that EVs maintain on average around 80 per cent of their rated range in freezing conditions.

Meanwhile an underreported fact is that gas-powered cars are likewise less efficient in colder weather. The EPA estimates that a drop in temperature from 24°C to 7°C can increase gas consumption by 12–28 per cent. And EVs actually start more reliably than gas cars do in the winter, because they aren’t affected by cold-sensitive oil and have no sparkplugs, which are especially susceptible to low temperatures.

Even when people appeal to facts to disparage EVs, their assertions are often only half true. The UCP government claims, for example, that electric vehicles do more damage to roads than gas-powered cars do, because they’re heavier. An EV does tend to weigh more than its internal combustion engine equivalent—perhaps 10–15 per cent more. But as Breton notes, EVs are lighter than the giant pickup trucks so common in Alberta, and the province isn’t levying a special tax on pickups. “Alberta and Saskatchewan are both taxing EVs under some dubious excuse,” Breton says. “It has a lot more to do with politics than facts.”

Horner, the Alberta finance minister, also justified the $200 tax when he introduced it in February 2025 as a way to offset revenue lost by drivers who don’t buy gasoline or diesel, which is taxed by the province. But Breton questions why the flat rate is disproportionately high. Albertans, on average, drive 15,200 km per year, consuming 1,216 litres of fuel in a typical mid-sized vehicle. Under the province’s current fuel tax of 13 cents per litre, that would translate into $158 in road taxes—21 per cent less than what EV owners must fork over. Says the EVAA’s Andrew Batiuk: “It seems punitive.”

In an emailed statement, Horner claims the tax is “fair” and states: “Alberta’s tax on electric vehicles is in line with what drivers of a typical internal combustion engine vehicle pay in fuel tax annually.” EV proponents find such stonewalling typical. Batiuk says his organization just can’t get the ear of government: “We don’t have much of a relationship with them.”

And if Alberta’s government were truly interested in a full accounting of the costs and benefits of EVs vs. traditional vehicles, it would consider other facts. Pollution from gas- and diesel-fuelled cars and trucks is killing people. A March 2022 federal report analyzed data from 2015 and found that 1,200 Canadians, including 82 Albertans, died prematurely that year from the effects of pollution from cars and trucks. Another 2.7 million people suffered from acute respiratory symptoms. Breton argues considerations such as marginally higher EV weight need to be weighed against the $9.5-billion annual health cost to Canadians from gas-powered vehicle pollution.

Horner’s statement dismissed pollution and health concerns. “Alberta has some of the cleanest air in Canada and the world, and that isn’t changing,” it read. “Our transportation emissions have declined 12 per cent since 2015 and will keep falling.”

But the main barrier to EV adoption in this province isn’t special punitive taxes, uninterested EV dealers or disinformation. Alberta drivers won’t fully embrace EVs until there are enough public chargers available across the province to ease so-called “range anxiety”—the fear that one’s car battery will deplete far from home. Similarly, the extent of the local charging network affects whether or not we will attract EV-driving tourists from places like BC, says Danielle Wiess, director of transportation initiatives at the Fernie-based Community Energy Association. “EV drivers go where they can charge.”

But the UCP government is offering no help to expand Alberta’s charging network. The province had 429 EV charging stations in December 2025. That’s just 6 per cent of the 7,000 chargers found in BC, which has 5.7 million residents versus Alberta’s five million.

In 2020 the Community Energy Association managed the Peaks to Prairies charging network, which connected communities from Canmore to Medicine Hat and south to the US border. Working with local municipalities, ATCO installed 20 direct-current fast-charging sites across southern Alberta. The $1.2-million contribution from the then-NDP government was the last time Alberta has funded any EV charging infrastructure, says Wiess.

Charging one’s EV at home also remains a vexing problem for Alberta’s renters and condo dwellers. Provincial building codes don’t require EV charging capacity to be added to new multi-unit residential buildings—condos and high-rise apartments. “We’re still building condos and apartments without charging infrastructure considered,” says the EVAA’s Batiuk. “At [a single-family] home, you can plug in an EV. But when you live in a condo or apartment, you don’t have the option to charge at home. Selling that person an EV is a more difficult task.”

The situation is even more challenging in rural areas that lack the fast EV chargers found in the Peaks to Prairies network. “If I have a boat to pull to a lake, and I pull it to Little Bow Provincial Park, there’s no chargers down there,” says Green, the GMC dealer.

Under a joint federal/municipal program, incentives cover up to nearly half the cost of installing chargers at businesses, condos, Indigenous communities, public facilities and not-for-profit organizations. But remote communities that install such infrastructure can encounter sticker shock just to keep their chargers operating. In December 2025 a City of Cold Lake committee reported that it would need to quadruple the rate the city offers at its city-owned EV charger. Wiess says Level 3 (also known as DC fast) chargers incur high demand costs if they’re used infrequently.

Alberta is also at odds with provinces that have created incentives to purchase EVs. BC offered rebates of $4,000 to buyers of electric vehicles but scrapped the program in May 2025 under budget pressure. Before the program ended, zero-emission vehicles accounted for almost one in four new vehicles sold in BC. In 2025 BC registered almost as many EVs in just its fourth quarter as Alberta’s overall number of EVs. (Alberta and Newfoundland are the only provinces that don’t provide Statistics Canada with data on new EV registrations. They only report total registered EVs.) Quebec, with a population of nine million, has even bigger incentives than BC did, and registered 82,700 EVs in 2025.

The feds announced in January they will allow 49,000 Chinese EVs into Canada. Previously tariffs made these prohibitive.

The ingrained resistance to EVs in Alberta manifests in some of the most unlikely places. Batiuk discovered that the owners of Ol’ MacDonald’s Resort and Campground, on Buffalo Lake about an hour northeast of Red Deer, imposed a $60/night EV surcharge in 2024. A notice on the resort’s website stated its “electricity etiquette” rule is “a small price to pay to ensure the fair and sustainable use of these shared resources.” (The Alberta Motor Association reports that the typical cost to charge an EV in Alberta ranges from free—at roughly half of Calgary’s public charging stations—to $15 at fast-charging sites such as those in the Peaks to Prairies network.)

Messages left at the resort for listed owner Jean MacDonald were not returned. “We [also] tried to talk to them,” says Batiuk, “and they weren’t interested in talking to us.”

But EV advocates such as Batiuk, Dean and Breton believe EVs will eventually prevail—including in Alberta. The federal government recently committed $1.5-billion to expand Canada’s public EV charging network, so essential to driving the vehicles any distance, especially rurally. Mark Carney’s government also announced in January 2026 that it will allow 49,000 Chinese EVs into the country at a nominal 6.1 per cent tariff rate. Previously a 100 per cent tariff had made the cost of these cars prohibitive. Even premier Smith had called for Carney to drop the tariff and let Chinese EVs in—if only because she hoped it would enable Albertans to sell more canola and pork in China.

Major Chinese manufacturers such as Chery and Geely are preparing to enter the Canadian market. BYD, which in 2025 surpassed Tesla to become the world’s largest EV maker, plans to open 20 dealerships in Canada, first in Toronto, then in Montreal, Vancouver and Calgary.

Those Chinese EVs may comprise just a fraction of the 1.8 million vehicles sold in Canada each year. But more significantly, federal EV incentives are being restored. Sales of EVs across Canada dropped by nearly one-third last year as provincial and federal incentives ended. In February of this year Carney introduced a new, $2.3-billion, five-year program that offers individuals or businesses up to $5,000 to purchase various types of EVs. At the time, the prime minister predicted EVs will reach 75 per cent market share in Canada by 2035 and 90 per cent by 2040.

By the time the federal incentives end in five years, Breton says, they may be unnecessary. This is a point on which EV advocate Breton and EV skeptic Green agree. “I’m not asking for special treatment,” says Breton. “Just don’t stand in the way of progress.” “I’m always interested in change,” says Green. “Just let the free market decide.”

Dean, a planner with the City of Calgary, says she sees beyond the personal benefits of driving an EV. She believes she’s helping future generations, and every effort counts. Someone once told her, “Your one electric car isn’t going to do anything,” she says. “And I replied, ‘But it’s what I can do. If I can do something, I’m going to do it.’ ”

Doug Firby has over four decades of experience in newspapers, including at the Calgary Herald. He’s now president of Troy Media.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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I’ve never been to Red Deer’s downtown, but as a prairie girl I feel immediately at home parking diagonally beside a diner fronted by a cheerful red-and-white awning and a sandwich board declaring today’s special: beef dip. I walk a block to the modern courthouse surrounded by a pretty garden. Inside I surrender my leather bag containing a notebook and three packs of nasal naloxone to bored-looking security guards. They ask if I’m a lawyer. I shake my head. Nobody gives me—a neatly dressed, middle-aged white woman—a second glance. I consider telling them I’m trying to understand the anatomy and physiology of fundamental rights.

The reason for my trip to Red Deer is to attend, in person, the hearing of a Charter challenge arguing that an SCS is an essential health service, one that’s potentially lifesaving.

Canadians believe that access to healthcare is a right of citizenship. Yet even people who are keenly aware of health inequities are often surprised to learn that the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the Canada Health Act and the numbered Treaties all fail to guarantee us a right to healthcare. And although Canada is a signatory to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which directly addresses health and medical care, that document is legally non-binding. Such lack of statutory protection partly explains why we see so few cases of Charter breaches regarding access to healthcare in Canada. The need for such protection has also been obscured by an assumption that elected officials, guided by the principles of medicare, will act in the public’s best interest.

I am attending, in person, a Charter challenge arguing that supervised consumption sites are an essential health service.

As a physician, it was only after health services that my patients really needed came under threat that I began to question why the public interest seems to regularly exclude the population I serve: people experiencing homelessness who use drugs.

The closure of Red Deer’s SCS is only one example. An SCS is a health service where people can consume their own criminalized substances (which are increasingly contaminated with toxic additives) without being arrested for drug possession or accidentally dying. In this uniquely decriminalized space, service users and care providers alike are exempted from charges under the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act (CDSA). Health professionals and medical equipment provide a life-saving response in cases of overdose, which is one of the reasons an SCS is sometimes called an overdose prevention site, or OPS. But an SCS operates under federal exemption, while an OPS operates under provincial ministerial order for an urgent, temporary response to a crisis. An SCS is also a simple and cost-effective intervention that connects people with other health and social services as well as decreases transmission of infectious diseases.

Over nearly a decade, between January 2016 and September 2025, at least 10,936 Albertans—an average of three per day—have died from opioid poisoning. But across Canada, including in Alberta, supervised consumption sites have responded to tens of thousands of poisonings—and not seen a single death. Irreplaceable by other services, SCSs are as critical to my patient population as cardiac catheterization labs are to people with coronary artery disease.

In following various court challenges around my patients’ access to care, I reviewed what all Grade 9 social studies students in Alberta learn. Federalism—the division of powers and the checks and balances that enable our democracy to operate—assigns to the judiciary the interpretation of legislation designed by elected representatives accountable to the electorate. The judiciary presumes that policymakers intend to be and are, after careful community and expert consultation, equipped to determine and prioritize the public’s best interest. When called upon to review a dispute, judges must at times balance the rights of some against the well-being of many. For example, an Alberta law meant to protect against traumatic brain injuries requires that all minors must wear helmets when bicycling, even though some object to the infringement on their bodily autonomy. This balancing act is a weighty responsibility and relies heavily on the public-interest presumption.

Yet times are changing. What happens when the presumption does not hold What happens when a government decides to ignore established frameworks for healthcare, when its community engagement is merely performative, when scientific expertise is mocked, when the public interest is defined so narrowly I’m all too aware how hard it is to witness despair on the streets. But I can’t reconcile how one person’s feelings of fear or inconvenience legitimize the annihilation of what is—to someone else—a life-saving health service.

Court of King’s Bench Justice Debbie Yungwirth presides over the hearing in Red Deer as lawyer Avnish Nanda reads from the affidavit of plaintiff Aaron Brown. Nanda describes how, prior to the Red Deer SCS opening in 2018, Brown had experienced numerous drug poisonings. In the seven years the SCS was operating, he had none. Then, within only a few weeks of the SCS’s closure on March 31, 2025, Brown experienced another life-threatening drug poisoning. He is arguing that the closure of the SCS is a breach of his Charter rights.

When I was working in Calgary’s emergency shelters as the drug poisoning crisis accelerated in 2017, a patient told me that, knowing he might lose consciousness after using drugs, he’d try to “land” in a public space with the hope someone would find him. To this man—as to Aaron Brown—an SCS is a lifesaver, a place to receive dignified and competent care instead of facing the end of his days alone on the floor of a mall washroom.

Data show that more people die in public from drug poisonings after SCS closures. Despite warnings of foreseeable harms, SafeLink Alberta’s mobile SCS for Calgary and Medicine Hat had its grant agreement retracted in the summer of 2019, after the UCP government froze all funding pending a review of local supervised consumption services. The provincial government then closed Lethbridge’s ARCHES SCS in 2020, after which that city saw drug poisoning deaths rise from 56 in 2020 to 125 in 2023. In Edmonton the number of overdose-related EMS calls to the area surrounding the Boyle Street SCS—which was shut down in the spring of 2021 under cover of the pandemic—have increased dramatically. Operating licences, granted by the province, on all remaining SCSs (in Calgary, Lethbridge, Grande Prairie and Edmonton) are set to expire by March 2026. As the government shows no signs of renewing these, Alberta may soon have no SCSs at all. Contracts are instead being handed to private, for-profit companies operating abstinence-only programs.

My application to speak about the positive impacts of an SCS was denied. I attended wearing tape over my mouth that read “Silenced.”

The provincial government justified its closures using results from its SCS review, which was conducted by an internally appointed UCP committee and which considered only socio-economic factors. The committee noted the impacts of an SCS on businesses, who felt “left out” of consultations, and on condominium owners, who perceived disorder and needle debris. My own application to speak to the committee about the positive health impacts of an SCS was, however, denied. I attended the public forum wearing a piece of tape over my mouth that read “Silenced.” I intended for this to represent the committee’s disregard for frontline health workers like me and, more importantly, the voices of the forever silenced: those who had already died from lack of access to an SCS. The government report was later criticized by public health scholars as “fundamentally methodologically flawed, with a high risk of biases that critically undermine its authors’ assessment of the scientific evidence.”

Albertans, now years into UCP governance, are no strangers to public consultation parading before a predeter-mined outcome. The SCS review was merely one of the first.

In the Red Deer courtroom, while I sit on an uncomfortable wooden bench suspiciously similar to the pews in my grandmother’s Protestant church, Nanda cites the case of Canada’s first SCS. Insite began operating in Vancouver in 2003. In 2008 prime minister Stephen Harper refused to renew the Criminal Code exemption that allowed Insite to operate. In 2011 the Supreme Court of Canada found this action unconstitutional. The court’s decision invoked section 7 of the Charter: Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of the person and the right not to be deprived thereof except in accordance with the principles of fundamental justice.   

While this decision preserved Insite’s service, Alberta’s SCS-related court decisions seem to take another tack. Even when a risk of irreparable harm is acknowledged by the courts, as it was in two other court cases I’ve tracked, policymakers are still given the benefit of the doubt to enact their laws. Judges here have overly relied on an interpretation of the public interest that is biased towards politically shaped perceptions of public safety, while their rulings undervalue the very lives of the dispossessed.

Aaron Brown’s is not the only case to challenge the provincial government’s cruel removal of lifesaving health services. “We don’t want to sue our government,” said Petra Schulz, co-founder of Moms Stop the Harm, “but we don’t have a choice.” Schulz lost her youngest child, Danny, to an accidental overdose in 2014, before the province had any SCSs. After the UCP took power in 2019, Schulz saw that government create barriers to access and then close the harm-reduction services she had worked so hard to help build in memory of Danny. She and others filed a Charter complaint in 2021; it was dismissed in 2022.

“As families who have lost loved ones to the toxic drug crisis,” Schulz says, “we do whatever it takes to ensure that people have access to essential lifesaving services. When all other avenues are exhausted, Charter challenges and the courts provide one more chance to reverse deadly government policies. As a private individual it’s scary to take your government to court. [But] it’s not as painful as losing your child.”

So many families and communities are still facing that pain. Meanwhile, Alberta’s government is determined to tackle an “addiction crisis” that seems illusory: while poisoning deaths are rising, the rate of substance use disorders in Canada has been holding steady.

In the court case I witnessed last summer, the provincial government claimed that the closure of Red Deer’s SCS was simply a matter of scarce resource allocation. Nevertheless, the UCP is pouring $1.55-billion into addictions recovery. If the decision to close an SCS were in fact based on a fiscally responsible government’s careful management of scarce resources, it would be difficult to reconcile how so many hundreds of millions can be invested in the ill-defined and far less acute problem of “addictions” while SCSs, meant to address toxic drug deaths, are shut down.

Having personally spent many hours supporting groups and agencies attempting to set up new SCSs in Alberta, I know that funding is far from the only barrier. It was difficult enough even before the UCP formed government to manage all of the protocols and processes for provincial approval and obtain the federal exemption required to run an SCS. After the UCP implemented new licensing standards in 2022, it became virtually impossible. Since then, no new SCS licences have been issued and no new permanent services have been opened.

Although Calgarians were told that dispersed services were being developed to reduce pressure on the single, centralized site run by Safeworks at the Sheldon Chumir Health Centre, and despite local shelter operators conducting meticulous community engagement and adhering to other licensing requirements, the public has subsequently been informed that new site proposals were unsuccessful. The Safeworks site itself has been threatened with closure ever since.

The Supreme Court of Canada has already ruled that access to an SCS is a Charter-protected necessary health service.

It seems obvious that neither cost savings nor discretionary, well-informed addictions policy are the real reason for SCS closures in Alberta. Policy proposal #22 at the 2023 UCP AGM reveals the party’s mission to deliberately close SCSs. It reads, in part: “Public consumption sites… are blights upon the neighbourhoods… and a hazard to the Albertans living in those neighbourhoods.” Although some perceive activity around an SCS as disruptive or even scary, there’s no evidence that an SCS creates additional crime. The absence of an SCS, however, does increase public drug use. Besides, any consideration of “neighbourhood residents” should include the people who use an SCS, as they often live nearby.

Done properly—that is, distributed sites with a variety of service models available—would enable harm reduction to be part of a comprehensive system of care that serves everyone. The UCP’s reasons for closing these sites are political.

Alberta deputy minister of mental health and addictions Evan Romanow outlined in an email the service alternatives to an SCS in Red Deer. These include a Rapid Access Addiction Medicine clinic, which provides walk-in treatment for substance use disorders, and “enhancements” to safe withdrawal (a.k.a. detox) capacity. While Alberta has long needed additional resources meant for treating substance use disorders or preventing severe complications of withdrawal, such as seizures, none of these alternatives provide a decriminalized space nor scientifically proven overdose prevention.

In Red Deer, Crown counsel Nate Gartke told the court that Narcotic Transition Service (NTS) would be one of the programs to replace the SCS. On a phone call shortly after my trip to her hometown, Dr. Thara Kumar, a Red Deer emergency physician who has worked at both the SCS and the NTS, explained why the latter cannot replace the former: “The NTS is small-scale, serving only those with opioid use disorder who were unsuccessful at all other treatments. The NTS is a different part of the continuum of care. The [SCS] serves everyone.” In the three months prior to its closure, the Red Deer SCS saw more than 5,000 visits from 173 unique service users. The NTS, according to a statement made in court by Gartke in April 2025, registered only six patients.

A few weeks after my visit to Red Deer, Justice Yungwirth dismissed Aaron Brown’s challenge. In so doing, she deferred to government: “Alberta did not create barriers to access available health services. Rather, Alberta made the decision to fund alternative services…. In the public interest, Alberta had a right to do so.” Nanda told me: “We are appealing. Mr. Brown believes that there is a moral, ethical and legal imperative to ensure that the errors identified in the decision are addressed.”

I too am troubled by Justice Yungwirth’s decision and its seeming disregard for the unique characteristics of SCS that protect the life and liberty of someone diagnosed with a substance use disorder, which is a mental disability. The potential for generalizing Yungwirth’s interpretation—which, it strikes me, is the whole point of case law—is also concerning from my point of view as a generalist physician in a province that is moving away from evidence-based health policy and toward supporting for-profit private interests. According to Yungwirth’s justification, “any specific health service” could thus be replaced: emergency departments by private hospitals, cardiac catheterization units by juice stands, primary care by quackery. Why Alberta has a right to do so.

Jenn McCrindle is a long-term outreach worker in central Alberta and co-founder of Reclaim Collective. Many of the challenges confronting the Red Deer SCS arose, she points out, from the failure of promises to build out the tiny trailer’s services to include comprehensive, wraparound services in a permanent location. “The trailer was meant to be temporary,” she says. “It feels like [the government] just wanted it to fail.”

Angie Staines, founder of 4B Harm Reduction outreach group, notes that as contaminants in the drug supply have become more complex—and therefore so too have drug poisonings—permanent supervised consumption services are needed more than ever. Responding to complex overdoses in a controlled setting such as an SCS is by far preferable to trying to do so in an alley or park. The response on the streets falls to “a lot of broken people doing heavy work just trying to keep the community safe,” Staines says. They’re often short of sterile drug use equipment. They face tighter requirements for personal ID. Staines says such realities prevent services from adapting to patients’ needs. The inevitable inadequacies are then used as an excuse to eliminate a service rather than improve it.

Having responded to many overdoses on the streets myself, I empathize with Staines’s and McCrindle’s significant psychological, physical, emotional and moral distress. Though I’m fully trained to respond to medical emergencies, lately I’ve been experiencing shakes and nausea after responding to streetside overdoses. It’s a feeling beyond overwhelming. Dr. Kumar also points out that “the current government makes people working in harm reduction and addiction medicine waste so much time and energy simply fighting to keep services—that are evidence-based and widely accepted through the rest of the country—open and funded. That energy could be so much better spent actually doing the life-saving work and trying to create new solutions to these complex problems.”

In addition to these many risks and frustrations, people who respond to drug poisonings are vulnerable to drug possession charges under the CDSA. Removing the decriminalized space of an SCS could therefore, as the Insite decision acknowledged, engage their section 7 Charter rights.

With its ruling on Insite, the Supreme Court of Canada has already decided that access to an SCS is a Charter-protected necessary health service. Yet Alberta continues to deliberately exclude whole groups of people from accessing care and is making appropriate care provision impossible. Our justice system must rise to the challenge and fearlessly check the power of politicians who recklessly breach Charter rights. If it doesn’t, who will?

Bonnie Larson is a clinical assistant professor of family medicine at the University of Calgary’s Cumming School of Medicine.

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To this Danielle Smith added: “I assure you, so do I.”

She wasn’t silent for long. In fact, the day before Smith quit the radio, she announced her new account at locals.com, a libertarian videoblogging site, where she could resume speaking her truth, only this time directly to an audience of paying subscribers and free from repercussions from boss, advertiser or mob. At least one freelance journalist paid for full access to Smith’s content. This is how non-subscribers could learn, for example, that Smith decorates her High River home office with the US revolutionary Gadsden Flag, a coiling rattlesnake—“Don’t Tread on Me”—said to represent the individual standing up to unjust authority. Snippets of Smith’s more controversial videos (on COVID, vaccines, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine) began circulating on social media.

The municipal realm is “the healthiest level of government.” Smith, 2022

But on May 13, 2022, a year into her newfound freedom, Danielle Smith said something on locals.com that a great many Albertans would agree with. Sitting at her desk, wearing a grey blazer, she first read aloud a subscriber’s two-part question: “What are your thoughts on other electoral systems Do you think there’s one best suited to represent the views of most Albertans?”

“You know,” Smith began, “my leading contender, if you want the truth, would probably be… Nunavut’s system, or the [one] you see in a lot of rural municipalities in Alberta.

“You get elected as an independent, based on your own steam. You get elected based on who you are, what you stand for. You’re not tied by some kind of partisan restriction. You don’t have some leader who can decide to punish you. You don’t have some leader who can decide not to sign your nomination papers.” (Here Smith chuckled; she was by May 2022 trying to re-enter politics by seeking a UCP nomination, and needed leader Jason Kenney’s blessing.)

“So… you’re removing the partisan labels and you’re just choosing the best person for the job,” she said. “I know—what a concept…! I think maybe we’re too polarized now. [But] when you look at the municipal level of government, it’s kind of the healthiest level of government.”

Her opinion was uncontroversial then. It’s notable now. Because just two days after praising non-partisan politics, Smith’s life again turned upside down when UCP members ousted Kenney. Smith dropped her UCP nomination bid. She leapt into the leadership race. She won. Eight months later she led her UCP to a general election win. And then premier Smith injected a heavy dose of partisanship into Alberta’s healthiest level of government.

A Janet Brown poll found that two in three Albertans want municipal candidates to be independent.

In October 2022, in just her third week as premier, Smith used a Calgary Sun columnist to float a trial balloon. She was being lobbied to legislate municipal parties, she said. “Calgary wants it, and Edmonton wants it too. There seems to be an appetite for it.” The Edmonton Journal later reported that third-party advertiser Take Back Alberta (TBA) was in fact behind the push.

Smith owes TBA. The group infiltrated the UCP—in leader David Parker’s words, “declaring war on Jason Kenney”—and orchestrated the premier’s removal through a leadership review. Its support was critical to Smith’s subsequent party leadership win. But the policy document that emerged from the UCP’s late-October AGM, Smith’s first convention as leader, at which TBA supporters dominated policy discussions, was silent on municipal parties. So too was the UCP platform during the spring 2023 election campaign.

By fall 2023, however, Smith said she was serious about bringing in municipal parties. Local politicians were angry. Calgary mayor Jyoti Gondek called it “the kiss of death for local representation.” Red Deer mayor Ken Johnson called the idea a “poor move,” saying cities should be “unfettered by party or partisan politics.” Cathy Heron, president of Alberta Municipalities, said partisan politics creates “votes along party lines or the party thought process. And so it doesn’t lead to good governance of a municipality.”

The sentiment went beyond politicians. “This is a terrible idea, and the public knows it,” Edmonton Journal reporter Keith Gerein tweeted. “Albertans don’t want it, the UCP didn’t campaign on it—but hey, why let those factors get in the way?” Said Andrew Knack, former Edmonton ward Nakota Isga councillor and current mayoral candidate, “If you’re looking at the provincial or the federal systems, that partisan system that’s set up, how many Albertans would really look at that and say, ‘Yeah, I want more of that municipally?’”

A Janet Brown poll in September 2023 found that two in three Albertans (68 per cent) want municipal candidates to be independent. Only one in four (24 per cent) want parties. Fully 81 per cent say their main concern is councillors “who are part of a political party would vote along party lines, and not necessarily in the best interest of the community.” Most (69 per cent) agree “parties would make municipal governments more divisive and less effective.”

Premier Smith commissioned her own survey that November. The results, published in late January 2024 in the Edmonton Journal—after that paper filed a freedom of information request—showed that more than 70 per cent of respondents were opposed to seeing parties on local ballots.

By this point Smith was back on the radio, on a Saturday-morning province-wide call-in show co-broadcast by 770 CHQR and 880 CHED. On the February 24, 2024, edition of “Your Province, Your Premier,” she said parties would now be legislated only in Alberta’s two biggest cities. The rationale was no longer that Edmonton and Calgary were asking for the change; it was that those cities’ elected representatives weren’t truly independent. “The smaller the municipality, I don’t know that they’re as partisan,” she said. “But when you get into a city the size of Calgary or Edmonton, you better believe it’s partisan.” The solution to this lack of independence, she suggested, was to tether councillors and mayors to parties, thus creating “more transparency.”

Her government introduced the Municipal Affairs Statutes Amendment Act, 2024, that spring. It defined municipal parties, which can’t be formally affiliated with provincial or federal parties, and created them in time for October 2025’s civic elections. The bill passed in fall 2024 with all UCP MLAs in favour and all NDP MLAs against. Said then-municipal affairs minister Ric McIver, parties will ensure councils “make decisions that are clearly in Alberta’s interest and reflect the transparency and fairness the citizens of Alberta deserve.”

If citizens deserve better, Smith’s prescription is tough to swallow. Since the time of Plato, people have been wary of their fellows who seek power. Trustworthiness surveys today rank politicians last, below even car salespeople and ad executives. A cottage industry of articles and books explores the “unique narcissism” of politicians. MPs and MLAs call their colleagues liars, incompetent, “a colossal piece of shit” or worse, and dismiss the parliaments and legislatures they themselves serve in as “daycares” and “kindergartens.”

But parties earn special contempt. An Environics study measuring trust in political institutions from 2010 to 2023 found that while 35–41 per cent of Canadians express “a lot” of pride in our political system, only 6–17 per cent have the same level of support for parties. The municipal realm performs at least twice as well as partisan politics, with “a lot of support” ranging from 16 to 31 per cent. (Other than Montreal and three cities in BC, most Canadian cities don’t have parties.)

In 2019 Angus Reid found that nearly two-thirds of Canadians say politicians can’t be trusted. One-third of Canadians believe politicians are primarily motivated by “personal gain” rather than a genuine desire to serve their communities. Forty per cent say the problem is getting worse. Again municipal politicians performed better, perhaps because most don’t belong to parties.

Clips from the House of Commons and legislatures confirm the public’s suspicions. Grownups in suits shout at grownups in suits, or heckle, jeer and bang on desks—behaviour that in a normal workplace would get you fired. Ads show grainy photos of party leaders at their worst (scowling, shrugging, sweaty) with circus music and out of context quotes. Party bots send frothy text messages as much to harvest respondents’ data as to influence voters. (In the 2025 campaign a Conservative “flash survey” gave as one of respondents’ two options on crime policy: “I want dangerous criminals terrorizing my streets.”) Once elected, parties often appoint their own donors and one-time candidates to “non-partisan” positions on public boards and commissions and pay them to write “independent” public reports.

Even the “healthiest level of government” isn’t perfect. But lacking party loyalties and machinery, civic politics doesn’t stoop to the blood sport and cronyism of federal or provincial politics. Organizations that seek more diverse political representation in Canada say the potential for collaboration and civil disagreement at city hall—and less need of powerful connections to get elected in the first place—is why newcomers or members of under-represented groups considering a run for office often prefer the municipal level.

This may already be changing. “I entered [politics] with an expectation that teamwork would win the day and that city hall would be a space for practical problem-solving and dialogue,” said Evan Spencer, Ward 12 councillor, in a February 2025 Calgary Herald column. “After all, municipalities are responsible for delivering essential services—transit, infrastructure, community safety—without the partisan baggage that dominates higher levels of government.”

“Or at least,” Spencer wrote, “that’s how it should be. Unfortunately, the political climate has shifted dramatically… Municipal councils are succumbing to the pressures of party politics. This transformation threatens the very foundation of local democracy. Party politics, by its nature, demands loyalty to a platform, a leader and a base of supporters. This dynamic creates an environment where councillors are pressured to vote along ideological lines rather than engage in the give-and-take necessary for effective governance.” After one term, Spencer isn’t running again.

The problem of elected representatives prioritizing their party over the people who elected them sometimes erupts to the surface.

In May 2015 junior-high teacher Robyn Luff was elected for the provincial NDP in Calgary-East. Here, in working-class Dover, Forest Lawn and Penbrooke Meadows, incomes are $9,000 below the provincial average and the percentage of renters is 30 per cent higher. Rents in Alberta back then were rising at three times the inflation rate, and nothing stopped a landlord from hiking the rent as much as they liked. Luff’s constituents wanted a limit—and a modest rent cap was in the NDP platform in late 2014. Rachel Notley called premier Jim Prentice’s notion that the market could deal with a housing affordability crisis “profoundly irresponsible.”

But by the following summer, after the NDP had toppled the PCs, rent caps were off the table. Said municipal affairs minister Deron Bilous, “Quite frankly… our government is not at this time looking to rent controls.” An undeterred Luff brought forward a private member’s bill in 2016 that included a proposed 2 per cent cap. The premier’s office told Luff to water it down. The bill was sent to committee, where it languished.

Two years later Luff was kicked out of caucus. The NDP said she didn’t understand party discipline. Luff said she wasn’t being allowed to represent her constituents. “Every power that MLAs are supposed to have has been taken away,” she said in a statement. “MLAs must vote at the direction of the leader at all times [a.k.a. whipped votes]. Questions from private members are written by ministries and given to them to ask… Decisions about who speaks in the House and to what bill are all made ahead of time by party leadership. Statements and questions at committee are all highly scripted and agreed upon ahead of time. If MLAs should choose to go against any of these directives, there’s a fear they’ll lose privileges …they’ll be isolated, their political career will be finished, their nomination papers will not be signed.”

Luff said stifling MLAs “leads to hyperpartisan rhetoric and to no actual debate on bills. Everything that happens in the House is predetermined, rendering everything that happens there to nothing more than a vehicle for scoring partisan points.… This is a mockery of representation and a tragedy of democracy.”

That MLAs are powerless, votes are whipped and messages tightly controlled is “modus operandi” for all parties, Mount Royal University professor Duane Bratt told the CBC. “Everything [Luff] described… sounded like traditional party behaviour.”

Stifling MLAs “leads to hyperpartisan rhetoric and no actual debate… a mockery of representation.”

More recently, Lesser Slave Lake MLA Scott Sinclair and Airdrie-Cochrane MLA Pete Guthrie said their UCP colleagues were prioritizing party interests over the public good. Sinclair refused to support the 2025 budget because it has little for healthcare and highway improvements in his riding but does have $183-million to help the Edmonton Oilers. He was kicked out of caucus. Guthrie said premier Smith had “deliberately” misled caucus about procurement issues at AHS, where reportedly over $600-million in public contracts were given to a UCP donor. He was kicked out a month after Sinclair. “Competent, honest governance has taken a backseat to political manoeuvrings that jeopardize the best interest of Albertans,” wrote Guthrie.

None of this is new. Edmonton-Meadowlark MLA Maurice Tougas, in the May 2009 edition of Alberta Views, described the legislature as badly scripted theatre. “Very early on in my term, I came to the realization that it hardly mattered what was said… 90 per cent of what was said in the Legislature was irrelevant.” Brent Rathgeber, a St. Albert MP who in 2013 quit the Conservatives to sit as an independent, said prime minister Stephen Harper’s staff would pressure caucus to obey talking points and vote “like trained seals.” With backbenchers tightly scripted, he said, “MPs don’t represent their constituents in Ottawa, they represent the government to their constituents.”

Since 2008, the Ontario-based Samara Centre for Democracy has conducted exit interviews with 160 MPs from across the political spectrum. In the book Tragedy of the Commons, MPs describe to Samara the fealty of party politics. “Almost without fail,” the interviewers write, “each MP describes the tremendous influence of their political party. From the manipulation of the nomination process to enforced voting in the House and in committees, the unseen hand of the party dominates every aspect of the MP’s existence.”

When Smith in 2024 brought in legislation to add parties to municipal politics, Robyn Luff tweeted: “The literal best thing about municipal politics in Alberta is that there are no political parties.”

In politics, language that conveys a specific message to one group and a different one to the wider public is called a “dog whistle,” named for the ultrasonic tool that’s inaudible to people but heard by their pets. Smith is telling us she doesn’t much like party politics; all she wants is to create “transparency.”

But that’s the dog whistle. “Transparency,” to the Albertans who wanted municipal parties, evidently means something different: We want more conservatives to get elected.

Alberta’s reputation as a conservative monoculture stems from the provincial PCs’ 44-year reign and from federal politics, where, over the dozen elections before 2025, 94 per cent of seats were won by Conservatives or Reformers. But our cities produce much more diverse representation. Progressive mayors Jan Reimer and Don Iveson in Edmonton, and Dave Bronconnier, Al Duerr and Naheed Nenshi in Calgary, served multiple terms. Prominent conservatives such as Calgary’s McIver (in 2010) and Edmonton’s Kerry Diotte (in 2013) failed in their mayoral bids. Progressives such as Brian Mason, Linda Sloan, Karen Leibovici, Bob Hawkesworth and Joe Ceci went on from city politics to win provincial seats for the NDP or the Liberals.

That the same Albertan might vote for a Conservative federally, the NDP provincially and for Iveson or Nenshi municipally shouldn’t be impossible to fathom. Different levels of government face different challenges and have unique responsibilities. And municipal issues are thought to be less ideological. As former New York City mayor Fiorello La Guardia said: “There’s no Republican or Democratic way to pick up the garbage.”

But in October 2021 high-profile conservatives in Alberta’s biggest
cities were trounced. In Calgary, mayor Gondek soundly defeated Jeromy Farkas, a former Manning Centre fellow. In Edmonton Amarjeet Sohi beat one-time UCP nominee Mike Nickel by 20 percentage points. A CTV reporter put a fine point on things: “Alberta’s two largest cities are now led by progressive people of colour.”

The results especially grated on conservatives who feel entitled to win every election in Alberta. The creation of municipal parties could fix this “mistake” of municipal politics. Calgary Herald columnist Rob Breakenridge: “It seems obvious that this is about stacking the deck in support of like-minded candidates in two cities where conservatives have often been on the losing end,” he wrote in April 2024. “Provincial and federal conservatives tend to fare much better, and that’s not lost on this government. There is, of course, the added bonus of potentially dealing with more-pliant city councils.”

Calgary Ward 13’s Dan McLean was one of the few councillors to openly embrace parties. He’s also a special breed of partisan, tweeting that if the Liberals won the 2025 election, “Canada will be invaded by the US.” He’s running for A Better Calgary (ABC), the city’s first party. McLean predicts more conservatives will now get elected in cities where otherwise “far-left” candidates hide their agendas and “common sense” right-wingers split the vote. “I feel like the majority when I walk out the doors,” he told the Calgary Sun. “[But] when I’m at city hall it’s all, like, ‘We’re doing the right things’ and ‘We’re saving the planet.’ With political parties, you’d have to identify who you are and what policies you stand by.”

But proponents of municipal parties may be missing a larger point. Danielle Smith, for example, when she re-emerged from the political wilderness in 2022, said she knew what she’d done wrong. “What I learned,” she told reporters, “is that a party doesn’t belong to its leader—a party belongs to its members.” But arguably a party doesn’t belong to its leader or its members but to its voters.

University of Waterloo political scientist Emmett Macfarlane writes in a 2025 Substack essay that Canadian parties have been gradually giving less power to delegates, MLAs or MPs to elect their leaders and more to individual party members. But despite seeming “more democratic,” the move has “come at the significant expense of further disempowering… [the] elected MPs whose primary job in Parliament is to hold governments to account.”

“By establishing a direct link between the leader and party members,” Macfarlane writes, “leaders assume an effective mandate not from their caucus [e.g., MPs elected under the same party banner]—people elected by millions of Canadians—but from a relatively tiny proportion of the Canadian population. For example, Justin Trudeau won the Liberal leadership in 2013 with 81,389 member votes. By contrast, 5,556,629 Canadian voters selected Liberal candidates to represent them in Parliament. The democratic legitimacy of the Liberal caucus as a whole far outweighs the democratic legitimacy of the party leader.”

Voters, Macfarlane admits, are often more attuned to leaders than to local candidates. “But when we ignore how our democratic institutions are designed and how our representative democracy is intended to operate, we see why problems like excessive concentration of power in the hands of the prime minister prevail, and why aspects of it have gotten worse.”

The end of independent councillors will embolden Take Back Alberta and empower party donors.

Smith herself has argued as much, writing in 2010 in Policy Options: “MLAs don’t work for their leader or their party; they work for the people of the constituency they represent, and more generally for the people of Alberta.”

But Smith’s creation of municipal parties siphons power away from the people of Edmonton and Calgary. Many local candidates are now beholden to parties, to party leaders and to opaque nomination processes. The shift away from independent civic councillors will empower party insiders and donors. It will embolden organizations such as TBA.

Indeed, all of this seems intentional. The same UCP legislation that enabled municipal parties brought corporate and union donations back into local elections (a change likewise not in the UCP’s 2023 election platform). These kinds of donations were banned from provincial politics by Alberta’s government in 2015, with the unanimous support of all MLAs. The donations were banned from municipal politics in 2018. Wildrose MLA Wayne Anderson that year told the legislature: “It’s important to keep special interests at bay when influencing [municipal] campaigning. The reality is that an individual cannot compete with a large union or corporation when they want the candidate’s ear. Under this legislation, local election candidates will only be able to accept donations from individuals, thus giving individual citizens more of a level playing field.”

Worse, under Smith’s new rules, donors can give to a candidate and to that candidate’s party. This essentially doubles the spending limit for party-aligned council and mayor candidates. “It puts local governments up for sale to the highest bidder,” Alberta Municipalities president Tyler Gandam told reporters. “Local elections will end up being about what influential [donors] want, not about what voters want. Independent candidates risk being outspent and drowned out by party candidates who enjoy the financial backing of corporations and unions. Who stands to benefit?”

In 2021 Jeromy Farkas did a Reddit “Ask Me Anything” (AMA). Farkas, as a councillor, was often seen as a universal naysayer. But in his AMA he said municipal politics produces more agreement than most people realize. “The reality is different from the soundbites,” he wrote. “I may not have agreed with council on issues like corporate welfare, the Olympic bid or the closed-door arena deal, but each time, I had the support of much of my constituency. I had to raise those issues, because that’s what my residents needed me to do. The media rarely portrays that I’ve worked closely with every other member of council to consistently deliver for my constituents—often with people you might think would be unlikely allies, such as councillor [Druh] Farrell and mayor Nenshi.” He gave as examples a city plan to remove lead pipes; support for a tool to help police find high-risk missing children; and funding for summer students.

Farkas lost that mayoral election. In a January 2023 interview with the Calgary Sun, he said it’s already hard for councillors to resist political pressure from parties. “We’re trained by the politicians and by the media that politics is tribal. If you’re on the red team, you have to always support the red team no matter what stupid things they do. The same thing goes for the orange team and the blue team. It’s even worse than that. It’s covering up the bad things your team does and turning a blind eye.”

Today Farkas is again running for mayor. He has chosen—as has Gondek—to run as an independent. Two party-aligned candidates are challenging them both. After Danielle Smith’s government brought in municipal parties, Farkas was asked by the Sprawl for his assessment of the idea. His reply: “Municipal parties at the city level—I think it’s cancer.”

Jonathan Haidt opened the book that Danielle Smith cited in her farewell-to-the-radio column with a quote from Rodney King: “Can we all get along?” King’s 1992 near-fatal beating by Los Angeles police precipitated five days of riots and 63 deaths. Haidt used these words deliberately, he wrote, because today so many people “are asking King’s question not about race relations but about political relations and the collapse of co-operation across party lines. Many Americans feel as though the nightly news from Washington is being sent to us from helicopters circling over the city, delivering dispatches from the war zone.”

Smith, the radio host who just wanted to have lively discussions about controversial ideas, said she endured vitriol and threats from the public and became overwhelmed by “extreme” political polarization. Scholarly research and polling back up her fears about the spread of polarization in Canada. Smith the online libertarian pundit then professed to admire above all other political models the “healthy” freedom from party straitjackets enjoyed by city councillors.

Smith the premier, however, stokes the flames of division.

In early 2025 Smith introduced legislation to make it much easier for Albertans to initiate a separation referendum. She admitted to CTV host Vassy Kapelos that the change was done to benefit her own party. “If there isn’t an outlet [for separatists], it creates a new party,” she said. A separatist splinter group, in other words, could do to Smith what her Wildrose once did to the Progressive Conservatives. Or it could do what TBA did to premier Kenney. It could send Smith back into political exile. Calgary Herald politics columnist Don Braid wrote, “Nobody expected the premier to reveal the raw cynicism behind her changes to referendum rules.”

One concern about polarization that Haidt foresaw is a growing threat of violence against politicians. Alberta isn’t immune to this. Rachel Notley, in her first two years as premier, reportedly received 11 credible death threats. In 2016 alone, 26 cases of “inappropriate contact and communication” involving the premier were sent to police. In 2022 MP Charlie Angus wrote in Policy magazine about federal politicians’ risk. “I can no longer count on my political ‘sixth sense’ when meeting people in public, because the conspiratorial mindset fed by disinformation doesn’t fit into a simple profile of age, class or demographic,” he wrote. “Parliament Hill security is advising elected officials to scope out public events before entering, to be briefed in advance on potential threats, and have an escape plan in case things go wrong.” That year, Canada’s MPs were issued panic buttons.

Haidt recalls that Rodney King, as he stumbled through his TV interview, choking back tears, said, “Please, we can get along here. We all can get along. I mean, we’re all stuck here for a while. Let’s try to work it out.” “This book,” Haidt wrote, “is about why it’s so hard for us to get along. We are indeed all stuck here for a while, so let’s at least do what we can to understand why we are so easily divided into hostile groups, each one certain of its righteousness.”

Political disagreements are a part of life. But we don’t have to further divide ourselves into hostile groups. We don’t have to encourage the worst kind of politics. Danielle Smith knows this. Yet she chose to drag Edmonton’s and Calgary’s municipal councils away from their imperfect independent traditions and into the partisan muck.

Evan Osenton is editor of Alberta Views.

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But it’s certainly the word Smith uses to describe how she is blurring the lines between the United Conservative Party and the United Conservative government.

The two, of course, are not the same. The party is responsible to its members. The government is responsible to all Albertans.

But that is not how Smith governs. In the weeks leading up to the party’s annual general meeting (AGM) last November in Red Deer, Smith embarked on a cross-province tour. She held a series of closed-door town hall meetings with UCP members where she reassured them she would table legislation to, among other things, crack down on gender pronouns in schools, ensure “parental rights” in education and protect Albertans’ supposed right to bear arms.

She fulfilled her promises, and in the fall legislative session also banned the use of ballot-counting machines in municipal elections and amended the Bill of Rights to give workers in government-controlled facilities such as hospitals the power to refuse to be vaccinated.

It is worth noting none of these were part of her campaign platform during the 2023 provincial election, where a majority of Albertans were concerned about affordability issues and the economy. These recent changes came only after listening to the demands of UCP members who passed policy resolutions on the floor of previous AGMs. Historically and by convention, governing parties usually treat such resolutions as non-binding suggestions—an opportunity for members to blow off some steam and share a pretense that they’re sort of running the show. The UCP’s resolutions, though, often pass overwhelmingly with little to no debate—and tend to end up as government policy.

Smith takes the resolutions so seriously that during last November’s AGM she held an “accountability session” on stage with two of her cabinet ministers to go over how she responded to the previous year’s resolutions.

During a year-end interview in December, I asked Smith how listening to 6,000 people at a partisan party convention to formulate legislation was democratic. “I look at them as a pretty big focus group,” she said of her members. “They come from all over the province, all different backgrounds, rural, urban, different perspectives.” Smith tellingly went on to say “we have to remember how politics works” and “I don’t become a leader unless I get the support of members.” She added she doesn’t simply take resolutions as fait accompli government policy, but first talks to stakeholders.

The government is responsible to all Albertans. But that is not how Smith governs.

However, Mount Royal University political scientist Duane Bratt says Smith’s approach dangerously narrows the gap between party and government and is therefore undemocratic. “Governments have to balance the interests of winning elections and appealing to a large population versus just listening to the core, hard-nosed group of activists within their own party,” says Bratt. “That’s always been the pattern—federally, provincially, NDP, conservative, didn’t matter. That has completely been put on its head by the UCP under Smith.” It’s a strategy that could come back to haunt her, says Bratt, if she continues to formulate government legislation on the back of party resolutions.

In November, members passed contentious resolutions that included declaring sex reassignment surgery to be on par with elective cosmetic surgery, and therefore ineligible for coverage by Medicare. Another declared CO₂ to be pretty much nothing but harmless plant food and so the government should scrap its target to make Alberta net-zero by 2050. Because of the precedent set by Smith, she’ll have to explain during the party’s next “accountability session” what happened to those resolutions.

Smith, though, has learned it is better to speak to UCP members than to simply dismiss their directives—as then-UCP leader Jason Kenney did at his own peril in 2018 after promising members a “grassroots guarantee” on policy ahead of an AGM. When members passed a controversial resolution that would essentially “out” students to their parents, Kenney shot down the resolution: “I will take the resolutions adopted today as important input, but I hold the pen on the platform.”

Kenney was maintaining a boundary between his party and his (future) government. He went on to win the 2019 provincial election. But by ripping up the “grassroots guarantee,” Kenney arguably planted the seeds of his own demise when his socially conservative base turned against him in a leadership vote.

On the other hand, Smith handily survived her own party leadership review last November with a 91.5 per cent vote after letting her membership base dictate government policy.

You might think that to be undemocratic. Smith says she is simply being an innovator.

Graham Thomson is a political analyst, member of the Legislature Press Gallery and former Edmonton Journal political columnist.

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Today the region, encompassing much of the South Saskatchewan River basin, is known as Palliser’s Triangle. It runs roughly from its westernmost point near Cardston, north to the confluence of the Red Deer and South Saskatchewan rivers near Oyen, before dipping south to Swift Current, Saskatchewan. And it has a lot of agriculture. This is because the drought that Palliser experienced abated and the region bloomed, as did settlers’ hopes of cultivating crops in the area. Palliser’s report, the first major survey of southeastern Alberta, was dismissed as pessimistic.

That change of perspective was just the first in a cycle in Alberta over the past 125 years, pushed along by dry years and wet years. People in Palliser’s Triangle have regularly had to manage drought or flooding, trying to smooth out the peaks and valleys of water supply. And for over a century now, the solution to flood and drought alike in the region has always been the same—build more irrigation infrastructure.

The Canadian Pacific Railway, having acquired much of the land in Palliser’s Triangle as part of a deal to build a transnational rail line, saw the potential to bring water to lands thought too barren to cultivate for food. It developed the province’s first large irrigation system, hoping to maximize its capacity to ship agricultural products east and transport European settlers and goods west. The CPR system began in 1903 with the construction of a weir at Calgary to divert water from the Bow River to the Chestermere Reservoir. The Bassano Dam, built in 1910, and an extensive network of canals allowed thousands more acres to be irrigated. Southern Alberta soon had one of the most extensive irrigation networks on the continent.

The CPR wasn’t wrong. The combination of a hot, dry climate and available water transformed the region. But today many Albertans are questioning whether further expansion of irrigation infrastructure is a good idea.

The first significant pushback to building more irrigation infrastructure in Alberta came from opponents of the Oldman Dam. Spurred by the 1984 drought in southern Alberta, Premier Peter Lougheed had commissioned a dam at the confluence of the Oldman and the Crowsnest rivers, just north of Pincher Creek. It would create the largest irrigation reservoir in the province. The Piikani Nation, where headgates were to feed a canal network west and north of Lethbridge, fought the project in the courts and on the land. The advocacy group Friends of the Oldman River was launched as well, alarmed that an environmental assessment hadn’t been done for the reservoir and dam.

After a court decision in December 1987 allowed construction of the dam to continue, an emergency debate was held in the legislature. “One of the most justifiable complaints about this project has been that the public—and when we’re talking about $350-million of taxpayers’ money, that means every taxpayer in the province—has not been given ample opportunity to voice their concerns,” said Edmonton-Glengarry MLA John Younie (NDP) in the legislature. “Those objections [are] both economic and environmental.”

Fred Bradley, MLA for Pincher Creek (PC), argued that the future of southern Alberta was at stake. “If we don’t have sufficient storage in the whole South Saskatchewan system, including the Oldman, there’ll be limits to development in the Bow River basin and the Red Deer River basin,” he told the legislature. By this Bradley meant that economic opportunities in those regions could be reduced if Saskatchewan didn’t receive its allotted water under a 1969 interprovincial agreement that dictates how much water must flow across the provincial boundary near Medicine Hat.

In May 1992, after the Oldman Dam was completed, a court-ordered environmental examination recommended that the dam be decommissioned, concluding “the environmental, social and economic costs of the project” exceeded its economic benefits. The Alberta government ignored the report.

Nearly four decades later, the arguments for and against more dams in the South Saskatchewan basin are much the same. People discuss the role of infrastructure in preventing flooding, mitigating drought and creating water security (for both Alberta and our neighbours), and question whether the benefits outweigh the financial and environmental costs.

The reservoir created by the Oldman Dam, for example, hasn’t always ensured water security. In December 2023 the province had 51 active water shortage advisories as drought gripped southern Alberta. In mid-August 2023 the MD of Pincher Creek saw its intake pipe exposed as water levels in the Oldman Reservoir dropped precipitously. The town had to truck drinking water in. That was also the situation for the rural municipality in 2016. Nor has the Oldman Dam always provided security to irrigators whose canals are fed by its reservoir. The initial water allotment for local farmers to begin the 2024 growing season was half the annual average.

But there have been undeniable economic benefits. Since the Oldman Dam opened, the number of irrigated acres in Lethbridge Northern Irrigation District has risen by more than 60 per cent. Irrigation has prompted a boom all along the Highway 3 corridor from Lethbridge to Medicine Hat, now an agri-food hub that processes potatoes and sugar beets grown using irrigation. The corridor includes greenhouses that fill Alberta’s grocery stores with tomatoes and cucumbers, while lentils, beans and peas flow through to international markets. The beef industry is also dependent on irrigation to supply feed crops and power “feedlot alley,” just outside Fort Macleod. Feedlots generate $1.6-billion in farm receipts in Lethbridge County alone.

According to a 2021 report by the Alberta Irrigation Districts Association (AIDA), irrigated acreage collectively represents less than 4.5 per cent of all cultivated land in Alberta’s 13 irrigation districts but produces more than a quarter of the province’s agri-food GDP.

Everyone can agree that the winter of 2023–2024 wasn’t the first time southeastern Alberta has experienced drought. Where people disagree is in what we should do about it.

Earlier this year AIDA released a report on the future of water management in southern Alberta. “The Adaptation Roadmap for the South Saskatchewan River Basin” recommends a multi-option build-out over 20 years involving more infrastructure, including a new dam on the Bow River just south of Brooks, another upstream near Cochrane, a third on the Red Deer River east of that city and a fourth on the upper Belly River, along the western edge of the Kainai Nation, southwest of Lethbridge.

The report also proposes a new off-stream reservoir—one supplied by a canal or pipe—along the Red Deer River south of Oyen to provide irrigation to the Special Areas, three sparsely populated municipalities atop Palliser’s Triangle. The Special Areas were constituted by the province in response to the mass abandonment of the area during the 1930s Dustbowl, and they have remained under provincial governance ever since. Irrigation could transform the region.

The AIDA report is currently being evaluated by the province. Budget 2023 allocated $5-million to study the feasibility of the Eyremore Dam near Brooks, with a report due in spring 2025.

Richard Phillips, general manager of the Bow River Irrigation District, is likewise bullish on building more infrastructure. He says AIDA’s report balances the needs of southern Alberta’s irrigators against those of municipalities while creating more resilience against not only water-supply variations consistent with historical trends but also those predicted by climate change modelling.

Phillips is also the chair of Irrigating Alberta, a consortium of 10 irrigation districts set up to manage the nearly $1-billion that has been allocated to the Alberta Irrigation Modernization (AIM) program. AIM, announced in 2021, is the province’s largest-ever one-time investment in irrigation. The districts themselves are contributing $163-million. More than $407-million will come from the Canada Infrastructure Bank, with the province contributing the remaining $245-million. The 56 projects covered under AIM—including four new off-stream reservoirs—have the potential to increase Alberta’s irrigated area by 84,000 hectares.

Phillips says demand is high for expanding irrigation, but he argues new infrastructure won’t lead to more water being used. In the past, “expansion of irrigation districts has been based on [creating] efficiencies …both on-farm improvements and district improvements,” says Phillips. “We’ve more than doubled the irrigated area since the 1970s but we truly don’t use any more water than we did then.”

In 1976 southern Alberta’s 320,000 hectares of irrigated land was using 2.1 billion m² of water annually. As of 2022 some 600,000 hectares in Alberta were being irrigated using 2 billion m² of water. A 2015 report prepared for irrigators, “Economic Value of Irrigation in Alberta,” says water efficiency in Alberta almost doubled from 1965 to 2010, largely through the use of more-precise irrigation systems.

Now, much of the AIM funding will be allocated to converting open canals to pipelines. This is projected to reduce the estimated 10 per cent of a southern Alberta canal’s water that is currently lost to evaporation.

But water needs vary year to year. A flash drought in 2017 and a prolonged one across western Canada in 2021 saw irrigation districts divert more water than was typical. In wet years such as 2010 through 2015, districts diverted far less. So new infrastructure in Alberta would be about “taking a long-term view… to improve water management for both wet extremes and dry extremes and everything in between,” says Phillips.

Just as with Alberta’s last major drought, which lasted from 2001 into the spring of 2002, the end of 2023 going into 2024 saw an El Niño weather pattern dry up southern Alberta before transitioning into a more neutral pattern. After shrinking alarmingly over the winter, reservoirs in Phillips’s district and the neighbouring Eastern Irrigation District, which draw water from the Bow, were near or above normal levels heading into the growing season.

The “solution” to flood and drought alike has always been the same—build more irrigation infrastructure.

Asked why more infrastructure is needed if Alberta has managed to weather two major droughts in the past quarter century, as well as several extremely dry years, Phillips pointed to the situation faced earlier this year by irrigators who rely on the Oldman system. Going into 2024 the Oldman Dam reservoir was at its second-lowest level ever—drier only in the spring of 2002. The St. Mary Reservoir, whose namesake river feeds into the Oldman downstream of the dam, began this year nearly empty. That situation led to an initial halving of the normal water allotment for St. Mary River Irrigation District farmers, down to eight inches.

“It was a very different picture there,” says Phillips. “This Roadmap (report) isn’t just about the Bow but the whole South Saskatchewan. Many recommendations will improve the Oldman and its tributaries as well.”

And the Roadmap isn’t just about irrigation, says Phillips; it will also develop resilience for flood and drought management. Indeed the report (and nearly every similar one commissioned by the province in the past two decades) says a changing climate is the main reason to build more water infrastructure. “If climate-change models are accurate—and time will tell—we’d expect to see more extreme cycles of flood and drought,” said Phillips. “We’ve seen some pretty crazy things in recent years… Last year we had a good snowpack in the mountains, but it all came down a full month before you would expect to see it. If that continues, it just becomes so much more important to be able to capture the water when it’s available.”

Southeastern Alberta saw record flooding events in 2010 caused by overflowing creeks running off the Cypress Hills. That was only a prelude to the swamping of communities along the Bow and the Elbow rivers in 2013, including downtown Calgary. Says Phillips: “This Roadmap is about adapting to highly variable water supply so we can still have the water we need, regardless of what the weather is looking like.”

Do the benefits outweigh the costs The Oldman reservoir hasn’t always ensured water security.

But just as they were in the 1980s during construction of the Oldman Dam, the benefits and drawbacks of more dams and reservoirs are open to debate. Biologist Lorne Fitch has been vocal in his opposition to more such infrastructure in Alberta. Fitch worked with Alberta Fish and Wildlife for 35 years before teaching at the University of Calgary and co-founding the riparian stewardship organization Cows and Fish.

“We have seriously overallocated water diversion flows in all of the southern regions,” he says. “As a consequence, many river sections aren’t functioning ecologically anymore. Fish populations have declined, riparian cottonwood communities have suffered, and so the overall impact of irrigation on our rivers has been profoundly negative.”

The Alberta government, despite its enthusiasm for irrigation, doesn’t dispute Fitch’s assessment of the state of wildlife. It announced at the start of a recent and ongoing fisheries engagement process that “native trout populations across the east slopes of Alberta have experienced severe declines in population size and distribution.” A 2018 U of C research paper shows that the population of rainbow trout in the Bow River, for example, shrank by as much as 50 per cent from 2003 to 2013 (Fitch wasn’t one of the study’s authors). This finding was corroborated by Alberta Environment field samples in 2018, 2019 and 2020.

The moratorium the government enacted in 2006 on issuing new water licences in the South Saskatchewan River basin eased some pressure on the environment, says Fitch. But he argues the move didn’t come in time. The amount of water that has already been allocated, he says, can, in a bad year, exceed the supply. “The reality is, the volume that has been licensed may, in some years, exceed the flow in our rivers. The past hasn’t been a good template for the future.”

In 1988 Alberta’s irrigation districts used their full water allocation on the South Saskatchewan River basin. Between that year and the 2006 moratorium, a half-billion more cubic metres of water was allocated from the basin. Collectively Alberta’s irrigation districts today comprise by far the largest water-licence holder in the province.

Moreover, new dams and reservoirs could put pressure on the shortgrass prairie, as the financial allure of cultivating native grasslands might prove too tempting to ignore. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature has called the Great Plains “the world’s most endangered ecosystem,” with more than 50 per cent of it converted to crops and much of the rest intensively grazed.

While Fitch isn’t against all developments that impact water—whether irrigation, industrial expansion or resource extraction—he says there doesn’t appear to be much will in Alberta for exploring how much is too much. “We’ve failed to recognize limits and thresholds. The more we cross those lines in the sand, the less resilient we are to changes—and climate change is going to be a big factor, a wrench in the works.” If our environment is already overextended because of our inability to respect ecological limits, he says, “we’re in serious trouble.”

Fitch is critical of the AIDA’s Roadmap report, calling it a product of the “irrigation lobby.” He describes the 19th-century economic theory known as the “Jevons paradox,” whereby technology increases the efficiency of a resource and lowers costs, which in turn further drives demand and ultimately increases overall use of the resource. And, indeed, greater efficiencies haven’t appreciably reduced the overall amount of water used by Alberta irrigators.

In the driest parts of winter 2023–2024, Fitch said the common refrain from farmers, politicians and “the man on the street” was that they hoped more snow and rain would save southern Alberta from drought. “The problem is, hope isn’t a strategy,” he says. “It’s an acquiescence to doing nothing or doing the wrong things. And that’s why we need a better, overarching, objective review of how we manage water.”

A key part of such a review, he explained, would be to help more Albertans understand how logging on the Eastern Slopes of the Rockies is limiting forests’ ability to act as a sponge. Healthy forests slow the release of runoff in times of both drought and flooding. “But the larger the footprint of logging, the greater the runoff…. We’ve subjected the sponge to too much pressure, and the headwaters can’t hold as much anymore. It runs off so much faster, as we’re giving it many more conduits, with roads and cutlines and off-highway vehicle trails.”

Fitch said what he’d like to see is more objective oversight of water management in the province, considering all resource development and its impacts on the environment along with land-use planning. “We have to be a lot smarter about this stuff.”

Fitch isn’t alone in his criticism. Retired agronomist Ross Mackenzie, who worked for Alberta Agriculture for nearly four decades, primarily as a research scientist, believes better on-farm water management and soil-moisture monitoring could make a bigger difference than digging more dams and reservoirs.

“Typically, a cereal crop such as wheat, barley or canola… most years you only need to put on 10 to 13 inches—roughly, depending on precipitation—of irrigation water,” he says. Despite this, he says, irrigation districts commonly provide up to 18 inches per field. Mackenzie remembers working with a farmer in 2023 in the Eastern Irrigation District who was facing the possibility of seeing his 12-inch allocation reduced during a particularly dry spring and early summer. But strict on-farm management proved more could be done with less, he says, with that farm garnering average or above average yields just through improved water use. “He was very careful how much water he put on each field and then reallocated to other fields, particularly silage corn, which was important for the (cattle) feeding operation.”

Mackenzie is critical of Alberta Agriculture for cutting its funding for staff to help irrigation farmers improve such water management techniques. “We have one irrigation extension person that works out of Brooks, but obviously he can’t speak to all farmers across 1.7 million acres of irrigated land. One person can’t do it all.”

Mackenzie also says irrigation districts haven’t picked up the slack left by the province. “Irrigation districts aren’t promoting using good management; they’re just screaming ‘We need more dams, more reservoirs for more water.’ In most years, we’ve had ample water.” A typical year, he notes, sees most districts use 60 per cent of the water available to them, with only some of them nearing 80 per cent of their water licence. “Most irrigation districts in the past 50 years have never used their full allocation. [Then] they have a couple of dry years, low snowpack in the mountains, and they’re saying they need more reservoirs. Most of the time, we don’t,” he says. “We just need to manage our water very carefully and we can do quite nicely.”

In fact, between 1987 and 2020, the average annual water use by irrigation districts comprised 53 per cent of their licences.

The Oldman Reservoir: Spurred by the 1984 drought, Peter Lougheed commissioned a dam at the confluence of the Oldman and the Crowsnest rivers. It remains Alberta’s largest irrigation reservoir.

Looking westward, in December 2023, over a part of the Oldman Reservoir that normally would be under water. Going into 2024 the reservoir was at its second-lowest level ever—drier only in the spring of 2002.

Mackenzie questions the need for the Eyremore Dam, which would be downstream of diversions for the Eastern, Bow River and Western irrigation districts. “All it would do is hold water to make sure (Alberta) is meeting its allocation to Saskatchewan to give them their fair share of water… We have to ask ourselves: for the one time in 20 years or once in 10 years that we’re a little bit short of water, do we really need to be building new dams?”

Mackenzie adds that money is another precious resource in short supply—and that the Eyremore Dam is expected to cost more than $1-billion.

Similarly, Dwayne Rogness, director of the South East Alberta Watershed Alliance (SEAWA), one of province’s 11 watershed planning and advisory councils, says he’d like to see more drought-resistant crop rotations. “Why aren’t we promoting a more drought-tolerant rotation?” he says. “Irrigators want to have row crops in their rotation, but when there’s only so much water, you need to think about adapting and being resilient (at the farm level).”

Rogness was an agricultural fieldman for Lethbridge and Warner counties for over 17 years prior to joining SEAWA, and grew up farming near Lake Diefenbaker in Saskatchewan (which lake was itself created in 1967 by damming the South Saskatchewan and the Qu’Appelle rivers). He says farmers and ranchers across Palliser’s Triangle are already capable of adapting to drought. “We take what the Bow and Oldman rivers give us. We make the best of all those (upstream) situations,” he says. “In all honesty, in the SEAWA watershed, someplace every year is under drought conditions.”

We need more drought-resistant crops. “When there’s only so much water you need to adapt.”

He likewise praises irrigation districts for developing efficiencies in their systems. But he, like Fitch and Mackenzie, doesn’t necessarily share their vision for the future. “Does that mean we add more irrigation?” he says. “I’m not sure.” SEAWA, he adds, is focused not on technological solutions to water shortages, but on natural initiatives, including replanting native species such as cottonwoods, sagebrush and wheatgrass in riparian ecosystems, promoting water conservation, and raising awareness of the role of biodiversity in overall watershed health.

For Richard Phillips, back at the Bow River Irrigation District, the answer is clear. Building more river infrastructure—more dams and reservoirs—will help prevent flooding while making southern Alberta better able to deal with drought. It will help irrigators too, of course, almost as a bonus. And most importantly, he says, building more infrastructure will constitute a recognition that providing a safe water supply to Albertans is a priority. “Districts have demonstrated time and time again that when water is short, people come first,” he says. He cites multiple declarations by districts to that effect. “Irrigation expansion isn’t a threat to water supply for towns, cities, people anywhere.”

Originally from Calgary, Alex McCuaig has been a journalist in southeastern Alberta for more than 15 years, working at the Brooks Bulletin, Medicine Hat News and Western Producer.

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Read more from the archive “More Irrigation, Fewer Farms” June 2021.

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The post Damming the Rivers appeared first on Alberta Views.

So are many of the birds. A walk through my old neighbourhood shows that the yards and gardens are as lush and well vegetated as they were 60 years ago, but birds seem fewer. Once-common species are missing; the cheery “chi-bik!” call of the least flycatcher, for example, is rarely heard now. But new birds that are there weren’t even in Alberta bird books back then.

Alberta has changed dramatically over the decades. Inevitably wild rose country’s birdlife has also changed. Our decisions, after all, shape their destinies too. The changes among the birds we live with amount to a sort of ecological report card on our ability to create what novelist Wallace Stegner once described as “a society to match the scenery.”

Where scenery is concerned, my old hometown has eaten a lot of it. Once confined to the sheltered confluence of the Bow and Elbow rivers, Calgary now sprawls across most of the wild prairies, sloughs and shrublands where I once built my lists of prairie birds. Urbanization has eliminated long-billed curlews, Baird’s sparrows, meadowlarks and ferruginous hawks. Other birds, however, now thrive in the urban forest that has grown up along city streets. We still have birds, just different ones.

Calgary’s estimated seven million trees provide habitat for a host of bird species virtually unheard of back when a much smaller Calgary lacked that sheltering canopy. Baltimore orioles forage in the tops of the elms that arch over residential streets. Blue jays chatter in back alleys, vireos sing through the long summer afternoons. House finches and Eurasian collared doves—recent immigrants to the province—nest in backyard spruce trees and feast at bird feeders. Calgary’s forest has turned an otherwise hostile urban environment into a place where at least some woodland birds have found new homes.

Cleve Wershler, a Calgary-based ecologist, lists off some of the birds that thrive in his urban landscapes: house wren, yellow warbler, American robin, northern flicker, black-capped chickadee, cedar waxwing, chipping sparrow, red-breasted nuthatch, common grackle, black-billed magpie. It’s a similar story in most of Alberta’s older cities and towns. As trees, parks and yards matured, birds moved in. Some are as fascinating as they are relatively unknown. Northern saw-whet owls, for example: round little birds whose distinctive repetitive call sounds like a saw being whetted with a file. If you live in Edmonton, chances are these little owls are your neighbours.

“Saw-whet owls appear to be quite common in the Edmonton river valley,” says Geoff Holroyd, a former Canadian Wildlife Service endangered species biologist who now chairs the Beaverhill Bird Observatory, east of Edmonton. “But in the historical records, they weren’t there at all. If you look at pictures of Fort Edmonton from 150 years ago, there’s not a tree in sight. They were all chopped down for firewood and building materials. So that means our forest is only 150 years old.… Those regenerated forests now allow flickers and pileated woodpeckers to build their cavities, which are then used by secondary cavity nesters like saw-whet owls. In the 1990s, when we made a concerted effort to find owls on the Christmas bird count, we got the highest count in North America.”

Growing Populations (Clockwise from top left): Robin, peregrine falcon, Northern saw-whet owl, raven, white-faced ibis. Alberta’s cities have urban forests where some woodland birds can now thrive. Irrigation reservoirs have produced new lake and shoreline habitats in Alberta, helping some water bird populations grow dramatically.

Holroyd hastens to add that, where forest birds are concerned, cities aren’t all good news: “A lot of the forests in the Mill Woods area have been cleared and are now subdivisions. The forest tracts I used to know south of Edmonton are gone. So we’re still chopping forests down, but where we haven’t it’s recovering and more diverse than it used to be.”

Holroyd points out that birds need more than just nesting trees in order to thrive in an urban environment. “When I moved to Edmonton there were nighthawks and purple martins in the city, but within a few years they were gone, and they’ve been gone for decades now. They were able to tolerate the initial invasion of humans, but the growth of the city wiped out their feeding habitats, and of course the spraying for mosquitoes interrupts the food chain for both of them.”

Myrna Pearman, the public face and voice of the Ellis Bird Farm near Red Deer until her retirement in 2020, says it’s not just urban birds that are doing well in Alberta. She notes that water impoundments such as irrigation reservoirs have produced new lake and shoreline habitats in parts of the province where they were once scarce. “Some water bird populations have increased dramatically—white-faced ibis, American avocet, black-necked stilt, American white pelican, osprey and black-crowned night heron. Ducks that benefit from nest boxes, especially common goldeneye, have also increased.”

But for all that some species have benefited from the new habitats we’ve created, the overall bird conservation picture is grim. A comprehensive analysis released in 2022 by the North American Bird Conservation Initiative shows that three billion fewer birds survive on this continent than when I was a young birdwatcher. Among those facing the strongest headwinds are grassland birds and aerial insect-feeders such as swallows and nighthawks.

Our native Alberta prairie birds are now less than half as abundant as they used to be. Swallows and other aerial insectivores are down by almost 60 per cent. It would have been inconceivable in the 1960s to imagine barn and bank swallows ever becoming scarce. Today both are listed as species at risk.

“Burrowing owl, long-billed curlew, ferruginous hawk, loggerhead shrike, chestnut-collared longspur and upland sandpiper all used to nest commonly in the Calgary region as late as the 1960s and early 1970s,” says Wershler. “With the loss of native grassland habitats, these are all now rare or non-existent.”

Pearman says the most discouraging land use trend she has seen in her time as an Alberta naturalist is the spread of canola farming and other monocrop agriculture. “Old farmyards are gone, fencelines are gone; there’s no more habitat.”

Declining Populations (Clockwise from top to left): Barn swallow, long-billed curlew, burrowing owl, common nighthawk. These prairie birds used to nest commonly in the Calgary region as late as the 1960s and early 1970s. But with the loss of native grassland habitats, they are now rare or non-existent.

Where prairie birds and insect-eating species are concerned, it’s not just the loss of nesting habitat and shelter that’s causing trouble. Poisoning is an even more insidious threat. Bald eagles, peregrine falcons and other raptors, as well as some songbird species, became endangered in the 20th century because of a highly toxic pesticide, DDT, that accumulated in the ecosystem to the point where birds could no longer produce young. Public concern led to that pesticide being banned. The renewed abundance of those birds is one of the great conservation successes of the past few decades.

But the agrochemical industry found replacement pesticides that are devastating in other ways. Neonicotinoids are a class of biotoxin even more effective than DDT at killing insects. Neonics are widely used now, not only as sprays but as seed treatments. Nearly every canola and corn seed planted in Alberta is painted with the new poisons which, being water-soluble, quickly wash into wetlands and streams.

Geoff Holroyd points out that neonics have been banned in Europe, and were the subject of a proposed ban here. Under pressure from the agrochemical industry, Health Canada backed down. “Research on the prairies has shown that the highest level of neonicotinoids in ponds is in the spring. They are in the soil; the snow melts, that flushes them into the ponds, and you get the highest levels and it’s still lethal. It’s killing the midges and aquatic insects that are the food of aerial insectivores such as tree swallows.”

“It’s one thing to have neonicotinoids available for treatment if you have an insect problem,” says Holroyd. “But just to prophylactically have them on every seed is irresponsible.”

He, Pearman and Wershler all agree that intensive prairie agriculture accounts for a lot of the harm to native Alberta grassland and wetland bird species. Some of the effects are obvious—vast monocultures that no longer provide habitat for prairie birds—while others are more subtle and unexpected.

“Tree swallows eat aquatic insects that are getting hit by neonicotinoids,” Holroyd says. “But barn swallows eat larger insects such as flies that would normally live in cow manure. Producers treat livestock with ivermectin to get rid of parasites. It remains active in their bodies and droppings for about six months. Cow pies, within six months of cattle being treated with ivermectin, aren’t used by insects. So cow pies no longer produce dung beetles and other large insects that feed barn swallows, burrowing owls and other species.”

The poisoning problem is a fairly straightforward fix. Banning DDT brought back endangered birds of prey. Banning the prophylactic use of neonics and ivermectin would help bring back insect-eating birds that have only recently become rare. But solutions to other challenges facing Alberta birds are more elusive. Climate change is the big one.

On the upside, Holroyd points out, a changing climate brings new birds into the province. “With climate change, birds are going to keep moving farther north. We’re seeing an increase in egrets, for example. The first white-faced ibis was at Beaverhill Lake in 1999, and now you can see flocks of hundreds.”

But for most birds, climate change offers a new set of problems. Pearman’s decades-long monitoring of mountain bluebirds shows that, because of earlier snowmelt, they now return to Alberta weeks earlier than before. That can create what Holroyd calls a “climate trap”—the sudden spring blizzards that birds used to avoid simply by staying south now cause many of those birds to freeze or starve. “Around Ellis Bird Farm,” says Pearman, “mountain bluebird populations have never recovered from the catastrophic spring storm of 2008.”

Meadow voles often breed under the snow. As snow-free periods become more frequent in winter, vole populations decline. Returning birds of prey no longer have a key food source. On the other hand, rivers that used to freeze over in the winter now support large wintering flocks of ducks and geese which in turn help sustain bald eagles, prairie falcons and other birds of prey that no longer need to migrate from the province at all.

Climate change yields winners and losers, just as landscape changes and the use of agricultural chemicals do. Sadly, many of the losers are songbirds, shorebirds and other native species that give our province its unique nature. The winners include ravens, magpies, gulls and other scavenging species that are able to profit from others’ losses.

The dawn chorus of birdsong is an experience that seems to be fading into Alberta’s past.

Awakening to a dawn chorus of native songbirds can feel like the whole world is shouting for joy. Sadly, among the many changes to Alberta’s birds, that morning chaos of birdsong is an experience that seems to be fading into the past.

Myrna Pearman says she no longer hears hermit and Swainson’s thrushes or ovenbirds on morning rambles near her home at Sylvan Lake. “While walking the woods, the spring birdsong of years past seems to be much quieter.”

Geoff Holroyd concurs: “The dawn chorus isn’t there. I was just out at Gregg Lake [northwest of Hinton] and you’d have to stop and listen, hear one bird, and then go on and hear another species and another—there isn’t the cacophony of song that there used to be.”

We could get it back—if enough Albertans cared enough about birds to demand better pesticide regulations, reformed land use policies and action on climate change. And in fact both Holroyd and Pearman see encouraging signs that this could happen.

Interest in birding exploded during and after the pandemic. Pearman’s Backyard Bird Feeding: An Alberta Guide sold out its first printing in less than six months. The second is almost sold out too. The Beaverhill Bird Observatory can barely keep up with public demand for its talks and nature walks. Holroyd says that nighttime owl adventures attract 70 people at a time, and the observatory hosted over 1,700 visitors in 2023. The off-site 2024 Beaverhill Snow Goose Festival drew 1,500 participants.

People who experience birds in their lives care about their well-being, Holroyd says, but they also need knowledgeable coaches who can take the experience and tease the meanings out of it. That’s what the Beaverhill Bird Observatory tries to do with its public programming, and it’s why Holroyd and Pearman deliver dozens of talks to thousands of curious Albertans every year.

“We need people to care about and understand every bird species, not just the most colourful or charismatic ones,” says Pearman. She’s right. As Alberta continues to change, so will its birds. How diverse and abundant they will be is entirely up to us. The first step is simple. Go outside, meet some birds, fall in love.

Kevin Van Tighem is an author, naturalist and former superintendent of Banff National Park (2008–2011).

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