Hello, Neighbours.
Over the last eight years, as I’ve sat to write my monthly missive to you, I’ve frequently remarked about the time-lag between what’s happening when I sit down to write, and what will be happening—over a month later—when you sit down to read. Never has that time lag been more significant than right now.
A month from now the course Calgary is on will have been determined by two huge decisions that will be made in November. The first decision will have been made by all Calgarians at the first stand-alone plebiscite in well over a generation; will we be aspiring to once again be an Olympic City, or will we be needing to look for other ways to focus a conversation amongst ourselves, and with the world, regarding who we are? My hope is that we went to the polls in record numbers and decided to pursue the 2026 Games with all the challenges and opportunities that entails.
But the other huge decision regarding our future that will have been made in November will have been a decision of your City Council. For the second time in our City’s history we will have passed a four year business plan and budget. And for the first time, that plan and budget will have shifted our city government’s focus from a conventional department-based exercise to a service-based approach. Called “One Calgary,” we’ve spent the last couple years determining that our city government provides sixty three distinct services to Calgarians and that the majority of these services require input from multiple departments. So rather than focus on departments, we’re shifting our focus to the services we provide.
I’m very pleased with this work—it’s chapter and verse Great Neighbourhoods—but this massive shift has been complicated by the challenging financial and economic environment Calgary is weathering; and two critical decisions impacting East Calgary will have been hotly debated over the course of passing One Calgary.
The single biggest issue is the $300 million hole in our revenue stream caused by the ongoing devaluation of the downtown core’s market value-based tax base. Nowhere else in North America exists a situation where a mere 126 individual properties could, over the course of three years, lose over $12 billion in value. As legislated by the province, our system requires we make up that difference across the non-residential tax base which means that Ward 9 businesses will be on the hook for a lion’s share of this crisis. I will be advocating for our businesses and seeking to share some of that pain across the residential tax base as well. I’ll also be advocating that we once again take the efficiencies we’ve been wringing out of our administration and use that money to offset the tax shift on our business community. Finally, as a longer-term solution, and as I’ve been advocating since the beginning of Great Neighbourhoods, we need to significantly overhaul our municipal revenue collection system. I trust this crisis will finally put us on the path to meaningful reform.
Finally, this budget will mark the beginning, and hopefully significant forward progress towards, of the struggle to meaningfully fund a permanent Main Streets Program. If our developed areas are going to be willing and able to take on a significant share of the growth that has traditionally occurred unsustainably on the edge of our city, we need to enable and reward that intensification with a major upgrade of our neighbourhoods’ backbone main streets—from the pipes under the ground, to trees, beautification, and an historic accommodation of active modes.
I’m hoping, as we enter December, we will be able to remember this past November as a huge inflection point in Calgary’s arc towards Great Neighbourhoods!
