November 2020: 3 Things About A 5-Point Plan - Celebrating 10 Years as Your Ward 9 City Councillor.
Sunday, October 18, 2020 marked the ten year anniversary of my service as your Ward 9 City Councillor.
It’s a milestone that both completely flabbergasts me as well as fills me with fierce pride. As such, I’m taking this month’s report to briefly reflect on the past ten years and what I feel have been the biggest accomplishments in our pursuit of Great Neighbourhoods.
Team Ward 9 told me that I could only list the top three. I argued that Great Neighbourhoods is a five-point transformation of city hall and our beloved Calgary and that, at the very least, I’d need all five.
They said, “keep it to three.”
I countered that the Mayor has produced an inspiring set of ten tenth anniversary videos, narrated by different citizens and illustrated by Ramsay’s Sam Hester, exploring different aspects of how the politics in full sentences he brought to Calgary has transformed our beloved city…
Click on this link to watch the full “Ten Years Together” Series
They said, “no, just three.” So here they are:
Great Neighbourhoods - A Safe and Inspiring City
The mantra is: “Great Neighbourhoods make a great city.”
Calgarians have always defined their citizenship from a home community-lens (I live in Fairview, Forest Lawn, Renfrew, etc.), and our fundamental nature as a people has always been to support our neighbours through charitable giving and volunteer work. Over the past ten years, there’s been a real evolution in how we think about, plan for, and build our neighbourhoods. The idea that a Great Neighbourhood is a walkable, complete, compact building block of a great city has gone from a fringe academic concept to the lifestyle aspiration of a growing majority of Calgarians.
More importantly, the idea that a Great Neighbourhood is a place for people of all ages, stages, wages, and backgrounds has similarly moved from the fringes to the centre; employment and a commercial Main Street, a variety of housing types and densities including affordable housing, and a spectrum of institutional supports from schools and faith communities to social service agencies, are increasingly understood as contributing to the positive evolution of our neighbourhoods, rather than as assaults on their character.
This evolution is occurring in the hearts and minds of citizens, as well as with the people who invest in and build our city.
From the perspective of what Great Neighbourhoods has accomplished, this evolution is also taking place by way of the policies, laws, and investments of our government.
Enough for All - A Prosperous City
Resilience is an important concept that has supplanted sustainability over the last ten years as the aspiration not only for the respect we pay the ecological systems that sustain us, but for the functionality of our societal ecosystems as well, and most importantly, for the ways in which natural and human systems interact interdependently. We are no longer interested in just sustaining things as they are, we’re interested in helping them thrive in response, and adaptation, to whatever comes our way.
When the rivers rose in 2013, Calgary bounced back quickly on account of our ability to look after both the landscape as well as each other. Resilience means that our planning for the next flood, the next drought, the next pandemic, and all manner of other human and climate change-precipitated emergencies, includes both physical interventions on the landscape, as well as policies and protocols for how best to work together and support each other.
Resilience also means that everyone - and especially our most vulnerable - are housed, that our communities evolve as complex webs of interdependence where no one falls through the cracks, and where mental health and addictions are responded to by social workers and medical professionals, as opposed to just the police.
A resilient and inclusive Calgary is a place where historic systems that perpetuate racism, and sexism, and homophobia are actively dismantled and our commitment to truth and reconciliation has us reworking the understanding of who we are as treaty people and continuing the work to improve our relationships with our Indigenous neighbours. I have been proud to be involved in City Hall’s leadership in these critical shifts in both what we talk about as well as in how we’re walking that talk.
Read more about Enough for All, Calgary’s 10-year community-driven poverty reduction strategy, that was adopted unanimously by City Council in 2013
Read the White Goose Flying Report, researched, written, and published by the Calgary Aboriginal Urban Affairs Committee
The Route Ahead - A City That Moves
Read more about the Green Line’s progress
One of the sociological concepts that has stuck with me from my graduate research days is the idea that a community evolves in two steps:
the first is in its understanding of itself;
the second is in the kind of relationships it wants to have with its neighbours.
While we are definitely evolving in our understandings of the kinds of communities we want to be, I’ve been deeply gratified over the last ten years as we’ve been much more thoughtful in pursuing different relationships; relationships between communities, between individual communities and the city, between our city and our regional neighbours, as well as the relationships between Calgary and Edmonton and Ottawa.
At the heart of these pursuits is a more healthful environment where we’re better able to thrive.
Perhaps the most significant example of these evolving relationships - one that involves how we interconnect communities and sectors within the city, in what we prioritize as a city, and in our relationships with the provincial and federal government, is the Green Line - which I call the backbone of Calgary’s best future.
But a great city of Great Neighbourhoods in thriving interrelation with each other is also about everything from a much evolved transit system, through a rebalancing of our priorities to include and celebrate active mobility connections, to better relationships between who are taxed and what we spend those public dollars on, and a more diverse economy and vibrant cultural landscape.
I’m super-proud of the work we’ve done over the last ten years to bend Calgary’s arc more solidly towards a more resilient, a more prosperous, and a more inspiring future. But we have much work left to do to get there - including persuading those who would take us in different directions and away from the goodness of this path.
I want to heartily thank everyone who has supported me and challenged me in the role I play facilitating us through this journey.
And, as the motto of Calgary boldly states:
Onward.