Spring 2021: A Stand-In for Better Things
I had big plans two months ago: I was going to write an extremely thoughtful piece that turned the corner away from all of the anger, fear and division of 2020 and welcomed 2021 as the start of our journey into the much better future our amazing city is capable of providing.
But it is a difficult piece to write, and I have struggled - late at night and on weekends - in trying to get it right.
This is not it.
This is a placeholder, a stand-in, a promise to get there.
Almost daily over the last two months, there have been incidents and news stories that provoke anger and fear and seem to drive the wedge between us even deeper—each incident nuances what I’m trying to say and contributes to resolution eluding me.
During the days (and long into the nights), there has been more work for me as a Councillor than at any other time in my ten years representing Ward 9. It is work lauded by some as critical to achieving our best future and reviled by others as steps in the wrong direction, or worse, as mere politics for politics’ sake.
Coming up on March 22, Council will deliberate on the Guidebook for Great Communities for Everyone - the document at the heart of transforming our planning system and beautifully setting us up to focus on building Calgary as a great city of Great Neighbourhoods. This work has been a long time coming - my entire three terms of service could be cast as the struggle to get things to this point and make good on this first essential step of the Great Neighbourhoods mission.
In conjunction with the Guidebook is a lineup of Local Area Plans that will apply the Guidebook tools to achieve a Great Neighbourhoods future for every community in Ward 9:
Renfrew and Fairview will be the first Ward 9 Communities to get forward-looking Local Area Plans through the North Hill and Heritage Communities Plans, respectively. Both are slated for Council before the summer break.
Bridgeland-Riverside, an early advocate for Local Area Planning but a casualty in the struggle to develop the right system, is working towards establishing a timeline to dust off its in-process ARP and amalgamate it into the North Hill Plan.
Ramsay, Inglewood and Manchester are all at a similar crossroads -- Do we take the work to date and bring it forward as the first iteration of the Historic East Calgary Plan, or do we send it back for more work and push the decision onto the next Council’s plate after the municipal election in October?
The communities of Greater Forest Lawn - International East Calgary - are slated for their own Local Area Plan early in the new term, and work is afoot to prep them in all their diversity to meaningfully participate together.
Millican-Ogden also needs to restart its ARP process and put a plan in place before the changes that the Green Line precipitates catches them unprepared.
Closely associated with the nuts and bolts of transforming planning in pursuit of Great Neighbourhoods is my work helping to lead Calgary’s contributions to developing a regional plan. For almost three years now, the ten neighbouring municipalities that comprise the Calgary Metropolitan Region Board have been seated at a table set for us by the provincial government and tasked with developing a plan that will protect and enhance our relationships with each other and the beautiful landscape we all share.
It is also a project fraught with controversy, fear, and anger as some of our neighbours are not interested in working together and share their disappointment at being required to do so. Our deadline for this plan is supposed to be June 2021, and the work (and the politics) are intense. Closely tied to all this planning was our big decision on residential speed limits in early 2021, which is also connected to the Ward 9 Dream Network.
And while the focus on physical city-building is in high gear, I have also committed to helping lead the work on addressing systemic racism by shifting our City into an actively antiracist stance. It should come as no surprise (but it surprises me none-the-less) that this work is also extremely controversial. For some, the controversy stems from whether this work is necessary. For others, the controversy is more overt (we actually have neighbours marching in the streets brandishing tiki torches). What is only disheartening for me, with all my privilege, is profoundly threatening to one-third of our neighbours (Calgary’s BIPOC population is 37%, and growing) who are the target of such brazen messaging and the un-Canadian, hateful intolerance and violence it threatens.
And amidst all this and much, much more on the plate is the angst and helplessness of COVID-19. I’m very hopeful that, by April, the slow trickle of vaccines will have reversed into a full-on flood, and we’ll be scrambling for arms to poke in order to keep up - our Emergency Management Agency is busy planning for the eventuality.
I look forward to a summer with friends and family and neighbours casually interacting like we were able to last summer. More importantly, I hope that we are able to continue this into the fall as normalcy returns.
I hope that being physically present with each other again will help us realize how we’ve always been and are together in everything and that which divides us will fade away. I believe that coming together to move forwards into a better place sits at the heart of who we are as Calgarians and Canadians.
And I hope to write something very coherent and compelling about that and share it with you shortly.