State of our City 2020
Summary
No More Time to Lose — A Just Transition Now!
In 1998 Sustainable Calgary’s first State of Our City Report identified 2 critical issues that needed attention – overconsumption of resources and socio-economic inequities in our city. Twenty-two years later, the evidence suggests that the state of these critical domains has only worsened. Calgary has seen a lot of progress in those 22 years and we remain a city with a very high quality of life, but an assessment of the 40 social, ecological, and economic indicators clearly demonstrates that the lifestyle we enjoy in Calgary is less sustainable than it was 22 years ago.
The first 20 years of this millennium are Calgary’s lost decades with respect to action on sustainability. In large measure, our failure to meet the sustainability challenge can be traced to dysfunctional decision-making processes – elaborated in a set of Governance indicators that we introduce for the first time in this report.
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The window of opportunity for a gradual transition to a sustainable future has closed. We must now embark on a rapid transition or face the real prospect of significantly compromised quality of life and livelihoods and a precarious future for our children and their city.
The Story in 7 Domains
Calgarians take pride in our sense of Community. While the indicators in this domain remain relatively healthy, our economic troubles are putting pressure on community cohesion and participation. Surveys conducted since the year 2000 indicate that a growing number of Calgarians feel a strong sense of community. For decades, a high number of Calgarians have reported being physically active. But we have seen less arts attendance and increasing crime rates over the past 5 years. These 2 reversals of long-term trends are probably related to our faltering economy. Surveys suggest an upward trend in community association memberships, but renewal of leadership and the maintenance of facilities are looming issues.
All Economic domain indicators are in unsustainable territory. Negative trends masked in the boom years are now being exposed.
We have the highest income gap of any large city in Canada. A single parent with 2 children would still be required to work over 55 hours a week to make ends meet. Food bank usage is as high as it has ever been. We have seen deteriorating housing affordability over the past 20 years. Having led the country in employment creation for much of the past 20 years, we now have the highest rates of unemployment of any large city in Canada, and there has been very timid movement toward diversification.
The Education system has performed well over the past 20 years. Our public library system is world class and heavily used, with the Central Library attracting global attention for its architecture and its programs. In our grade schools, we have some of the best international test results compared to Canadian averages and to other OECD countries. Our public schools typically achieve provincial performance targets. However, we are seeing a rise in class size after several years of decreasing numbers, and we are missing government-mandated targets. One area of concern is the lack of support for daycare, resulting in too few spaces, fees that many families cannot afford, and the chronic issue of poorly paid staff. Another is that levels of adult literacy have been stagnant for 20 years: 40% of Albertans are considered functionally illiterate.
Calgarians are among the healthiest people on the planet. However, many of our Wellness indicators are trending in the wrong direction, are stalled, or are moving too slowly toward improvement. While fewer children are showing up in emergency rooms with asthma attacks, mainly due to better management of the disease, youth obesity remains a significant health issue. We have more low-weight births than anywhere else in Canada, and we compare unfavourably with Europe in this regard. Surveys show that more people consider their own health to be worse than others their age. Although income supports for people with disabilities have improved over the past 10 years, they are still well below the poverty line. There has been no discernible shift of health care budgets away from treating disease and toward preventing it.
While there is room for improvement, Calgarians are lucky to live in a high-quality Natural Environment, with 4 of 6 indicators sustainable or trending toward sustainability. Air quality shows a slightly improving trend and is relatively good. Water quality, as measured by fecal coliforms downriver of the city, is improving. Per capita water consumption is at a 20-year low. There has been a 20-fold increase in the number of community gardens since 2000. With respect to pesticide usage, we are on a positive trend in usage per capita and by active ingredient intensity, but application is still quite high.
Resource use indicators are almost universally in unsustainable territory. Calgary is living well beyond its means. Our ecological footprint continues to grow and is the largest of any Canadian city. If everyone on the planet consumed as we do, we would need 4 to 6 planets' worth of resources. Our energy consumption per capita has grown significantly over the past 20 years, and our large and growing per capita GHG emissions constitute a crisis. Our overall population density, while slowly increasing, is far from sustainable and leaves us almost completely dependent on the private automobile and vulnerable to long-term maintenance costs. Steady improvement in numbers taking transit to work through the first decade of the millennium has reversed in recent years. Transport spending in the City budget is tilted in favour of transit, but overall spending by all levels of government still favours road building. The only good news story here is how we deal with waste. Total waste to landfill is down over 50% since 2001, with waste-diversion programs delivering results.
Four of 5 Governance indicators are trending unsustainably. Our democracy is under strain. Those we elect to government and to positions of power and influence do not reflect who we are or what we value. Money plays too big a role in politics. Between 2007 and 2015, campaign spending by successful candidates in municipal elections increased 400%. In 20 years, we have seen no improvement in the numbers of women, visible minorities, or Aboriginal people participating in leadership positions in our city. Calgarians’ satisfaction with the planning process is lower than it was a year ago but 10% higher than the 15-year average. We don’t have enough information available to determine whether our city has a sound long-term fiscal balance.
The Lost Decades: An Inability to Turn Policy into Action
The past 20 years have seen an impressive array of city-building policies adopted by City Council.
Many of these policies have been formulated with substantial citizen engagement, and most of them aspire to move Calgary toward a sustainable future. The problem is not policy. The problem has been backing up policy intention with budgets and workplans that allocate resources to make it happen. A review of the 40 sustainability indicators leads to the conclusion that the past 20 years have been lost decades – so much promise, with so little to show for it.
Twenty years ago, imagineCALGARY engaged an unprecedented 35,000 Calgarians in a conversation about our future – about what kind of city we wanted Calgary to be in 100 years. In 2004 Mayor Dave Bronconnier announced imagineCALGARY's long-term vision to the world at the Habitat for Humanity conference in Vancouver. Sustainability became the City's core planning objective. This was followed up with the Plan It Calgary process. For the first time, the Calgary Transportation Plan was integrated with the statutory Municipal Development Plan (MDP), guided by the imagineCALGARY 100-year vision. Subsequent City policy was crafted to operationalize Plan It Calgary – the Growth Management Strategy, the Pedestrian Strategy, the Bicycling Strategy, Complete Streets, the Climate Resilience Strategy, Transit Oriented Development, and most recently the 5A Network Principles (Transportation) and the Great Communities Guidebook.
The City’s own report card on the MDP was released in 2018. The report states that the City is not on track to meet its MDP targets. Too many people still drive, and too much of our housing stock is still being built and planned on greenfields at the edge of the city, bursting beyond the soon-to-be-completed ring road. In 2019 City Council approved 14 new greenfield communities, even more than the development industry lobbied for. We know this edge-of-city land-use, segregated, car-dependent form of development will never pay for itself, yet we continue to build it.
Our city continues to grow with no realistic plan to reduce our unsustainable levels of resource consumption. We are building a city that makes life more difficult and expensive for socially and economically marginalized citizens and communities.
Our indicators suggest that this state of affairs is fueled by a dysfunctional democratic process, at all levels of government – a process that is growing more and more beholden to the wealthy. Over the past 2 decades, our resource wealth reached its apex. Rather than use that time and wealth to ensure a transition to a new economy in the face of the global climate emergency, we are left with lost decades. We will likely never enjoy the level of wealth we have experienced in the past 20 years. Yet over the next 20 we have to make a rapid transition to a sustainable future or risk a serious erosion of both our quality of life and our prospects for the future of Calgary.
Calgary in the Global Village
In the 1960s, Canadian Marshall McLuhan coined the term global village. As Canadians and as Calgarians, we are intimately tied to the global village. Our prosperity is defined by the nature of our relationships with our neighbours in that global village. Over the past 75 years, during a period in history referred to as the Anthropocene, the nature of our economic and social relationships have become untenable socially, ecologically, and economically. Our impact on the planet has grown exponentially, relations within the global village have become more unequal and unfair, and the climate and biodiversity crises threaten us all. Each of these global trends are reflected locally in the 40 sustainability indicators reported herein.
In 2018 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported that “the next few years are probably the most important in our history.” It is abundantly clear that without action, the heating of our planet will make human life on earth much more difficult. The climate crisis has been created by the rapidly accelerating burning of fossil fuels to provide cheap energy and the manufacture of consumer products far beyond the needs of most Calgarians. Our place of privilege in the global village is a direct result of the bounty of fossil fuels beneath us. We have become wealthy through the fossil fuel economy, and our city is more affluent and stable than most places on the planet. For these reasons, we have a moral obligation not only to contribute to the solution to global warming but to be leaders in dealing with the climate crisis.
Thomas Homer Dixon (author of The Ingenuity Gap), among others, has warned of the diminishing capacity of human societies to successfully deal with multiple emerging crises. The climate emergency is top of mind, but the rate of resource extraction; the volume of material we produce, consume, and throw away; and our food choices all contribute to an equally critical global biodiversity crisis. The inequality that has grown in our city over the past 20 years is mirrored in the global economy. Most Canadians – and even more so, Calgarians – are among the wealthiest 1% in a global economy that has created winners and losers and allowed fewer and fewer people to control more and more wealth, distorting our institutions of governance in the process. In the past 5 years, we have witnessed attacks on our democratic systems that are unprecedented in most of our lifetimes. None of this is sustainable.
We may have the ingenuity and resolve to meet these challenges, but despite the pride we take in our “get 'er done” attitude, our reactions to date give no assurance that we do indeed have what it takes. There is no plan for transition from the deteriorating conditions of the Anthropocene to a sustainable future – no credible global plan, no credible national plan, no credible provincial plan, and no credible city plan. In fact, in our province and our city, resistance to transition remains a dominant political, cultural, and economic force.
Yet Calgary is not an island. We face existential threats to our quality of life and the future of our city. The fossil fuel infrastructures on which we continue to rely are in danger of becoming stranded, unusable assets as global investment wakes up to the threat of climate change. The problems of orphaned wells and post-production cleanup threaten to bankrupt our province or leave it an ecological wasteland. We continue to build a high-maintenance city while the prospect of paying for it all recedes. Having lost 2 precious decades, we must now move toward rapid transition.
The Way Forward: Leaders, Not Laggards
There is a moral imperative for Calgarians not only to step up to the plate as members of the global village and to pull our weight, but to show leadership – to become first responders. For too long, we have been counted as laggards. What do we need to do?
We need to acknowledge that while fossil fuels built our city, our future is elsewhere, and we need to direct all of our collective energies to building the new Calgary.
We need to take care of the most vulnerable first. How well we do so is a measure of the character of our society. There is no reason we cannot provide affordable shelter for all Calgarians. All citizens who contribute their labour to our economy should expect, at the very least, a livable wage in return. The vulnerable among us who need income support should not be condemned to live in poverty.
We need to design a steady state economy that is, above all, fair and just and that allows us to live within our means economically and, more importantly, ecologically. Our indicators suggest that over the past 20 years, we have experienced what ecological economist Herman Daly has referred to as uneconomic growth – growth that makes us worse off.
We can follow the lead of places like Iceland and New Zealand and commit to redesigning our economy to focus squarely on well-being and to retool planning for the transition to a healthy, sustainable, circular, and relocalized economy.
We need to resist the temptation to dismantle the systems that are the foundation of our well-being – health and education. We need to protect and grow our social capital.
We need to stop the outward expansion of our city. We need to invest in transit and active transport infrastructure. We need to build a city where walking, biking, and public transit are the norm and the private automobile is a tertiary mode.
We have the seeds of opportunity for the transition – young, vibrant, highly educated people and a culture of learning personified in the new Central Library. With respect to energy, we are on the cusp of a final transition once we tap our tremendous renewable energy resources. We have a growing design culture and expertise endowed from years of prosperity. We need our buildings, neighbourhoods, transportation, the city, and the region designed for sustainability – there is no reason to settle for anything less.
We need to welcome those from all over the world who are willing to contribute. We are a country, province, and city of immigrants. During the Syrian refugee crisis, Calgarians answered the call and demonstrated what is our better nature. Continuing to welcome new people, new ideas, and new energy from all corners of the world will make life better for all of us.
We need to get our political house in order and restore trust in our systems of governance: get money out of politics, and reinvent our democracy with fairness at the core.
Trust: The Fragile, Frayed & Priceless Cornerstone of Sustainable Community
We will not find our way forward if we do not trust one another or the institutions through which we make decisions. Trust is a valuable and fragile currency that bolsters the social and economic health of a community. Trust builds social cohesion and capital and is in turn strengthened by social capital.
Low levels of trust mean greater economic costs – higher legal fees, more complicated contracts, slower pace of transactions, risk aversion for investors, and non-compliance with regulations. Low levels of trust translate into low voter turnouts and resistance to change. Low levels of trust lead to alienation and reluctance to support social welfare programs. Citizens expect institutions to be reliable, responsive, and efficient. They expect them to act with integrity, openness, transparency, and fairness. If institutions fail to honour these values, people will withdraw their support, and that is bad for everyone. Without trust, information flows and communication are slowed, and compromise and policy reform in areas like fair taxation and climate change is made more difficult.
According to the most recent Statistics Canada report on public confidence in Canadian institutions, 43% of Calgarians report some or a great deal of confidence in the federal Parliament, and only 34% confidence in major corporations. The highest levels of trust were reported for the school system (63%) and the police (81%). In fall 2019, when asked whether the City of Calgary practices open and accessible government, is working to improve citizens' input, and uses that input in decision making, and whether citizens have meaningful input, roughly 60% to 70% of Calgarians agreed. But between 2017 and 2019, these areas exhibited negative overall trends, with “open and accessible government” experiencing the steepest decline. Those who expressed trust in City Hall fell from 62% in 2017 to 52% in 2019. During the same period, levels of distrust rose from 15% to 23%.
The Statistics Canada data highlight some serious problems when we examine how many people expressed “a great deal of confidence.” In 2013, only 9% of Canadians had a great deal of confidence in the media; only 10%, in Parliament; and only 6%, in major corporations. Of particular concern is the decreasing ability of civil society to hold elected officials accountable for resorting to half-truths and outright fabrications. We have entered a period when some leaders seem to have decided that lying and deception are winning strategies. Therefore, these findings have serious implications for our democracy and our economy. Ownership concentration of social media, combined with technological innovation and polarizations in society, have undermined our trust in institutions and in those who represent them.
The OECD report Trust and Public Policy highlights a noticeable reduction in trust in government during and after the 2008 global economic crisis (from 2007 to 2015). The report states that “against a background of perceived inequalities in income and opportunities, high unemployment and job insecurity, resistance to globalisation and concern over global pressures such as immigration and climate change, restoring trust is essential.”
The one silver lining in all of this is that Canadians express higher levels of trust in government than do citizens of most OECD countries. Notably, trust in institutions was especially high among recent immigrants compared to those born in Canada. Women and older Canadians express higher levels of confidence than men and younger Canadians. Aboriginal people are less confident in institutions than are other Canadians. Canadians with higher incomes and higher levels of education express higher levels of confidence.
If people perceive that the system is rigged against them, they will oppose it. For the past 40 years, many Canadians have experienced increased marginalization and increased inequality, with a very few reaping a greater and greater share of the economic pie. We are at a critical moment when transformational change is required to confront the climate crisis. Without a political system we can trust, there is no good reason for those who have been marginalized to support change. Climate change and loss of biodiversity are existential threats. We cannot deal with them without simultaneously dealing with inequality. We cannot deal with inequality without fixing our democracy. Trust takes a long time to build but can be destroyed in an instant.
Creators of State of our City: Noel Keough, Bob Morrison, Celia Lee, Adrian Buckley, Bill Phipps, Melissa Ayers, Nevena Ivanovic, Deborah Sword, Ron Jaicarron, Jason Ribeiro, Sajjad Fazel, Sarah Piwowarczyk, Milton Ortega, Miho Lowan-Trudeau, Hemontika Das, Eliot Tretter, Andrea Hull, Neil McKinnon, Clark Svrcek, Linda Grandinetti, Bob Morrison, Nic Dykstra, Taylor Felt,
Leticia Chapa, Alfred Gomez, Byron Miller, Ryan Martinson, Victoria Fast, Srimal Ranasinghe.