Ward Boundary Review: A Thoughtful Call to Action
For the first time in 30 years, I am no longer writing from my desk in the sunny, south-facing office of my family’s Blue House on Inglewood’s New Street. Recently, my wife, son, and I packed up and moved across the river to a bright, street-oriented condo at the base of a 7-story building in Bridgeland - a decision driven by a number of factors, most easily summarized as “planning for the future” - and essentially, what remains at the top of mind as I discuss my thoughts on the Ward Boundary Review with you.
In COVID-19 lockdown, with none of us clear as to what the future holds, the idea of long-term planning seems beyond our grasp. But while we wrestle with these big uncertainties, there’s still work to do and tackling our tasks provides an essential foundation for framing the larger picture.
On my list, and due April 3, is the task of providing input to our City Clerks as they consider adjusting the Ward Boundaries prior to the 2021 Municipal Election. Thus, I’m writing this to fulfill both the City Clerk’s request for feedback, but also as a report to inform my constituents about the important role that ward boundaries play in achieving our Great Neighbourhoods mission. I hope that it serves as a call to action and motivates you to join me in providing thoughtful input to the City Clerks before the consultation deadline on Friday.
Given the disruption caused by the COVID-19 outbreak, and the relatively minor adjustments required of Calgary’s ward boundaries, it’s very possible that this is one of many things that will be pushed back to a later stage in our recovery. It is very possible that it may not impact the 2021 Municipal Election at all.
But that doesn’t take away from my basic proposition:
The organization of our ward boundaries has a significant impact on our City’s future.
To begin, it’s important to know we periodically adjust ward boundaries because we have a legislated obligation under Alberta’s Municipal Government Act to maintain relative population parity between the constituencies that elected officials are meant to represent.
Besides population parity, additional criteria were included to guard against the bizarre electoral districts that result from the gerrymandering that often occurs south of the border. Our rules sensibly call for ‘block-shaped’ wards, maintaining the integrity of communities of interest and community associations alike, and adhering to recognizable geographical boundaries, etc. Beyond that, there’s nothing that specifically speaks to the real value proposition involved with carving up the city into different constituencies and, more importantly, how the impact of certain changes might shape the type of representation elected to our City Council.
Ward Boundaries in Flux
The Ward 9 I was first elected to represent in 2010 is very different from the one I represent now, and different from the one my predecessor, Joe Ceci, had represented years prior.
The Ward 9 of 2010 was a compromise, but it was a good one:
For years, the NE corner of Calgary - home to our incredibly vibrant and thriving South Asian Community - was shattering the growth projections upon which the ward boundaries of the time had been built. The growth in the NE, combined with the multi-generational households common among South Asian families, meant there were more houses and considerably more people per household than previously anticipated.
The obvious solution was also the problem: cutting the NE’s Ward 3 in half would result in a chain reaction, effectively wiping out East Calgary’s Ward 10 off the map and reconstituting it in a totally different part of the city. This meant that a broad community of interest would no longer be served by the members of City Council they elected to represent them. The former Ward 10 Councillor would have been forced to decide which half of their constituents they wished to serve, and then challenge one of their current colleagues (who wasn’t impacted by any of these changes) for that opportunity.
At the time, all members of Council representing East Calgary intended to seek re-election, so Council understandably chose to make minor changes and defer the big decision to a future Council facing different circumstances.
The Ward Boundary Commission
After the 2013 election, the need for significant redistricting became critical. Ward 10’s Andre Chabot was publicly considering a run for Mayor, and the concern of redistributing a ward underneath an elected member of Council was potentially not a problem. But before Council committed to redistricting, it took pause and asked the Ward Boundary Commission to consider whether it might finally be the time to change the total number of wards.
Calgary has been a 14-Ward city since 1976, a time where approximately ~35,000 constituents were represented by one of the 14 part-time Councillors (then referred to as Alderman), with a total population hovering close to ~470,000.
In 2013, we were home to 1,149,552 Calgarians, making the process of redistricting, adding, or subtracting, the total number of wards a much bigger deal. So, from the start, a real conversation about values permeated the process beyond the technical imperatives of numbers and ratios.
The Commission’s first phase of work resulted in the recommendation that no new wards should be added at the time, or possibly ever. And Council agreed. While it might seem superficially more democratic to have fewer constituents represented by each Councillor, the values behind such a decision rested on the fact that, at its essence, Calgary’s City Council is a Board of Directors for the multi-billion dollar corporation that we collectively own.
Those familiar with good governance understand that too many members around the Board Table puts a drag on any organization’s ability to govern efficiently. As good stewards, we also understood that maintaining our current number of Councillors and resourcing them with one additional staff person would save millions of dollars in comparison to the alternative proposal of adding 2 or 4 new Councillors and wards. Additionally, and perhaps most problematic, a larger city council would significantly increase the possibility of party politics creeping into the intra-personal board relationships we all strive to maintain.
Thus, everyone agreed that a larger city council was not the answer.
And so the second phase of the Commission’s work was initiated, steeped in the values that had driven their first decision, maybe more so than anyone realized - underlying the up-front exercise of how best to divvy up the city from a numerically proportional perspective, was the question of how best to set the table for as good a board of directors as possible.
2020 and Beyond
Currently, I find that I’m experiencing a considerable amount of angst about the options before us today because they lack a similar values-based perspective that needs more attention. What we’ve been presented with is far from a technical minor adjustment, and I’ve taken any opportunity on the floor of Council and through social media to call attention to this missing nuance. That is also, of course, the whole point of this report.
As you’ve had time to consider some of the historical background of Calgary’s ward boundary changes, I implore you to consider the following…
The first value-based argument, and the one more specific to Ward 9 as currently constituted, is this:
We are an important historical community of interest.
With the boundary adjustment that took effect in 2017, for the first time in our City’s history, the neighbourhoods and working and natural landscapes that have historically been referred to as East Calgary have been united into a single, meaningful place. Ward 9 is a model ward as it constitutes a rich mix of demographics, tax bases, and urban, suburban, rural and industrial landscapes; it is block-shaped and bounded by major roads as per the technical requirements; and it is recognizably a place in its own right.
The Ward 9 of today IS East Calgary.
Current Ward Boundaries, capturing the distribution of urban communities between wards 7,8,9, and 11.
Now more than ever, the imperative to transform Calgary into a city that will better be able to survive and thrive long into an uncertain future should be apparent: a city of Great Neighbourhoods - or in the parlance of our new planning Guidebook, Great Communities for Everyone; a city with a diversified, thriving economy and a vibrant culture of vibrant cultures; a city of sustainable, accessible infrastructure systems, that better balances growth between new communities on the edge with thoughtful infill and densification in existing communities; a city with a tax base that covers the operating and capital replacement costs of the services provided by a responsive municipal government; and, a city steeped in resilient practice and process to weather the shocks of climate change, pandemics, and whatever else the future might hold.
Ward 9 is the model.
So, I’m very worried that the historic assembly of Ward 9/East Calgary into a diverse model increment of Calgary’s best future may not last more than one term. I’m worried that the two proposed options sever Ward 9’s meaningful assembly of inner city constituencies off from the rest of East Calgary, leaving Greater Forest Lawn, with all of its challenges and opportunities, adrift in the powerful tax base (but voterless landscapes) of the Industrial SE, as well as leaving the greenfield landscapes of Belvedere disconnected from their essential central East corridor MAXPurple link to Calgary’s inner city. I’m also worried about the kind of Council we might inadvertently elect through a districting scheme that over-concentrates inner-city voices, perspectives and votes into two, or at best three wards.
Read more: Ward 9 Demographic Profile
Which brings me to the second, and broader, values-based argument:..
Calgary is a unique exemplar of the challenges that confront postwar North American cities.
Where 85% of everything we’ve built on the face of the continent has been built in the last seven decades, and where almost all of that growth has been suburban in nature, Calgary not only exactly reflects that reality, but it uniquely encompasses that postwar experience into a single unicity with one government and council, one tax base, and one service delivery model. This unicity model has made us much more organizationally efficient than the conflictual metropolitan situation that confronts the vast majority of the rest of the continent’s cities.
Unfortunately, this organizational efficiency has also hidden from us the structural inefficiencies baked into suburban growth. As such, we are more sprawling, less dense, and much, much more consumptive of per capita infrastructure than almost anywhere else on the planet (Calgary was just named the top city of 100 cities worldwide to be a... driver by a London-based institute which is I guess what you win when you’ve built a mind-boggling ~77 lane kilometers of road per person in your city).
The problem we now know, in Calgary, and across North America, is that suburban growth occurs at a diseconomy of scale and in the long run, has massive social, health, environmental, infrastructural, economic, and fiscal costs that cannot be borne by the dis-aggregated suburban tax bases that represent 85% of our built landscape. For over 20 years, since the mid-1990’s Go-Plan, Calgary’s policy intentions have been clear that our best future is dependent on delivering an increasing market share of denser, more mixed-use, more tax-dense, urban growth.
The question before us now is:
How do we elect a council that will best champion these outcomes?
Since getting elected in 2010, I have been a staunch advocate of this vision’s best future for our City.
Great Neighbourhoods is our plan to get there.
Each time I point out that Wards 7, 8, & 9 represent 50% of Calgary’s tax base, I do so in the face of eleven other members of Council who are collectively responsible for the other 50%, and who are therefore structurally disinclined to change that status quo. They are also structurally inclined to be very sensitive to the needs of their suburban constituents that are often reflected by incredibly expensive interchanges and road widening to stay one step ahead of the congestion that threatens to erode the suburban quality of life. And further, they are also structurally attuned to the needs of the development industry who are deeply invested in conventional growth on our city’s edge.
The challenge that confronts us when establishing ward boundaries in Calgary is that while 85% of our population is currently suburban, our best future needs to better resemble the needs, values, and lifestyles of the urban 15%.
The easy thing to do is to divide Calgary into urban and suburban wards, which is what the proposed option A (and to a slightly lesser extent, option B) ostensibly does. The outcomes of these options are two more-likely-to-be urban-minded Councillors and twelve more-likely-to-be suburban-minded Councillors.
Such a council will not be structurally inclined to pursue the goals aligned with our best future.
It will not be structurally designed to support the best Board of Directors needed by our city, especially at this time.
The Ward Boundary Commission of 2013-2017 had thought about this type of structural design, and played with an early scheme involving wedge-shaped wards that all met within and shared Calgary’s downtown as well as reaching outwards and included a portion of Calgary’s edge. This concept was ultimately rejected, not only because it contravened the block-shaped imperative of the statute, but also because it was acknowledged that the critical voice of the downtown would be too diluted to matter in the political calculus of individual suburban-majority wards.
The best solution included striking the fairest balance possible between a maximum number of urban-minded Councillors without diluting those constituencies to the point that there would be no urban voices on Council at all. In order to maximize the possibility of urban representation on Council without too dilution, the ideal balance is between 4 - 5 wards. This is the situation our current ward boundaries allow for, and consequently, what Options A and B fail to include.
Option A creates two super-urban wards, and Option B creates three somewhat urban wards.
And most concerning for us, both strip away the balance and identity found within Ward 9.
And so, to the Clerks and to my colleagues on Council, I urge all of us to be extremely thoughtful about Calgary’s journey, its Board of Directors, and what the best future for our City looks like as it emerges from the 2021 Municipal Election.
And to my constituents, or any citizens of Calgary who have taken the time to consider this report, please take this as a call to action and share your values with our City Clerks before this Friday, April 3, through the website, calling 311, or via email at wardboundaries@calgary.ca
We will get through this pandemic as Calgarians have always gotten through challenging times - together.
And we will emerge out of this with an even greater need to build a Great Calgary of Great Neighbourhoods.
Let’s be very thoughtful about the critical role ward boundaries will play in this essential work.
I remain committed to doing the same.
Gian-Carlo Carra