One July day in 2006, a few ticks after midnight, Dashiell Waite made his historic entry into the world, weighing in at nine pounds, eight ounces at Rockyview Hospital.
While his weight put him in the 96th percentile for boys, that’s not the figure that made Dashiell newsworthy.
At birth, he was honoured as the one-millionth Calgarian. It was a milestone for a city that had boomed and busted several times, and came 122 years after it was first incorporated as a town.
Calgary’s charge to its next big round population number is happening faster than almost anyone could have predicted.
If it keeps growing the way it has, Calgary could welcome its two-millionth resident by the middle of next decade. Before not-so-little-anymore Dashiell reaches his 30th birthday.
As people in what’s now — amazingly, to some — a 1.6-million person city prepare to choose their next council, few election issues are as overarching as the immediate pressures and long-term needs that come with Calgary’s rapid population growth.
It affects topics ranging from affordable housing and neighbourhood zoning to transit and infrastructure, to taxation, homelessness and addiction, and even public safety. More and more people put more and more demands on their city government, and on their mayor and councillors to manage it properly.
Growing pains
So it’s no surprise that the city’s growth underpins many campaign promises.
“Calgary’s population is booming, but our recreation facilities, libraries, and parks haven’t kept up,” says the website of The Calgary Party and its mayoral hopeful Brian Thiessen.
Jeff Davison pledges to “prioritize transit expansion, road improvements, and sustainable planning that meets the needs of a growing city while reducing congestion and improving quality of life.”
Sonya Sharp pledges “new fire halls where Calgary’s rapid growth demands it.”
Two million, candidate Jeromy Farkas said in an interview, “sounds like a crazy number.
“But if you work your way backwards in terms of what that city of two million people needs, it becomes a much more solvable problem that we can define and we can actually plan for and be proactive to deliver.”
Farkas is contemplating aggressive models for urban growth, a continuation of the recent trend that had Calgary balloon by 173,000 people in just 2023 and 2024, according to provincial statistics. That’s almost like adding the entirety of Lethbridge and Medicine Hat, in a two-year span.
By Farkas’s reckoning, the next council could welcome baby number 2,000,000 before the term ends in 2029. He’s even suggested on his website that Calgary will grow to three million in the next decade.
However, slower immigration rates have already tempered the pace of growth in Alberta, making the recent years of remarkable six-per-cent population increases less likely.
Over the last 20 years, the city’s population has grown at a yearly average of 2.46 per cent. If that pace continues, Calgary could hit the two-mil mark by 2034.
Three million could be within reach by the mid-century mark.
Compare that to the growth projections contained in Plan It Calgary, the major planning blueprint city hall crafted in 2009. It envisioned a steadily growing city reaching two million in about the 2050s.
And that trajectory would have put planners more than 200,000 people behind where Calgary’s population is today.
“We certainly planned for growth. It came faster than we expected,” says Kathy Davies Murphy, the city’s director of city and regional planning.
Asked when the municipal government now expects the two-million mark to be reached, she’d merely say at some point “within the next 25 years.” She explained: “It’s really hard to understand the boom-bust cycles of the city, and also how emerging industries may impact the growth patterns in the city.”
The city has published its own forecast out to 2030. It expects population growth rates to taper down toward the end of the 2020s, to levels more similar to the lower ones experienced during last decade’s oil-price bust. It projects Calgary’s population to be around 1.75 million by decade’s end.
But that forecast does see Calgary’s greater metropolitan region surpassing 2,000,000 by 2029, up from an estimated 1.8 million last year.
Greater Calgary is the fourth-largest metropolitan area in Canada, behind Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver — but the city itself is smaller only than Toronto and Montreal.
And given that the Quebec city stood at 1.76 million in the 2001 census, and hasn’t been growing as rapidly — and may shrink with reduced immigration — Calgary could become Canada’s second-largest city within a few years.
While that may lend clout, it may also lend itself to a Spiderman-style adage: with great numbers comes great responsibility.
There are those in Calgary who believe the city’s not doing wonders at accommodating its current growth in numbers.
Step by step
“We’re so far behind in terms of what we’re doing for infrastructure,” said Deborah Yedlin, head of the Calgary Chamber of Commerce.
“You can’t invite people to come here, you can’t have your Alberta is Calling campaign and then have people be unable to afford housing, take two hours to get to where they need to go for work or to access services, have classrooms that are over capacity and a health care system that can’t keep up with the demand.”
Yedlin readily acknowledges that education and health are provincial responsibilities, and out of city hall’s hands. But that speaks to the need for the provincial and federal governments to help assure a booming city has the resources to succeed, she said.
Yedlin moved to Calgary in 1992. To get down near Spruce Meadows for road cycling, she recalls having to take a rickety, one-lane bridge at 37th Street S.W.
She understood at the time that the ring road would be arriving shortly, though of course it took much longer than hoped.
The chamber has issued its own municipal election platform, focused on tackling the challenges and strains of the “explosive” pace of growth. Among its demands for a more vibrant, well-connected city: full build-out of the Green Line LRT from southeast to the north end, including a tunnel through downtown (which the province has aimed to kibosh in favour of elevated tracks).
“What we have to do is be really, really forward looking and get ourselves out of how much is this going to cost now versus what’s the opportunity cost if we don’t do it right,” Yedlin said.
The business group’s platform notes that in 2010 the city said the southeast LRT would be necessary by the time Calgary’s population hit 1.25 million. (That actually happened in 2015.)
Any criticism of the city’s management of a population boom might land at the feet of its incumbent mayor, who is running for re-election. Jyoti Gondek says that when she finds people who are aware of how big Calgary has gotten, they’ll also tell her their concerns about what that’s meant.
“There is absolutely a strain on this city,” she said in an interview. “We grew in a way that was not forecasted or projected.… We were taken quite by surprise when we saw more than 250 people a day moving here.
“We’ve done our best to keep pace.”
She cites efforts by council and city administration on that front, including approving more new edge communities and a housing strategy that removes hurdles to inner-city infill projects. Particularly in the wake of last summer’s disastrous water main break, city hall has accelerated its water infrastructure upgrades, including a new treatment facility near the 50-year-old Bearspaw plant, and new water feeder main networks.
There’s a cost to all that growth, Gondek added, which is why she advocates ensuring there’s a strong enough tax base, both in a bustling downtown and suburban industrial sectors — as well as a budget and tax-rate strategy that factors in population growth and inflation.
Full house
While that 2009 master-planning strategy did underestimate the city’s current growth rate, it did set an ambitious goal for densification. By the 2060s, half of Calgary’s expanded population would be absorbed within existing communities, and half in new suburbs.
That strategy has since been revised to count new units, not new people. And last year, 27 per cent of new homes were infills, a marked improvement over past performance, Davies Murphy said.
“It’s important to consider using the infrastructure that we have, and optimizing that,” she said. “I think it’s the most efficient way to grow the city. And a way to keep taxes as low as possible.”
The controversial rezoning move to allow row houses in all neighbourhoods was one step toward that 50-50 goal, but several mayoral and ward candidates have promised to repeal blanket rezoning.
Sharp is among those pledging to quickly axe the row-house rezoning policy, reasoning that Calgary’s leadership has put too much emphasis on it — and not enough effort to ensure older neighbourhoods can handle infill growth.
“If you want to move people downtown [to] live in the established areas, you also need to make sure that your fix-it first mentality on infrastructure can hold the development in these communities,” Sharp said in a mayoral debate last week, pointing to the Bowness water feeder break in the ward she’s represented the last four years.
She also said that one lifestyle choice (new suburban dwelling) shouldn’t be “villified” at the expense of the other.
But one just needs to look at Calgary’s residential construction activity to know where the growth is happening. It’s the bulldozers and framers preparing new communities, it’s the cranes throughout the inner city erecting new apartments and condos, and it’s the blue fencing and “Proposed Development” signs scattered throughout the city.
Calgary hasn’t been taking in 20,000 or 30,000 or even 75,000 or more people a year without that growth happening all over, in each quadrant and ward.
The next batch of mayors and councillors might not be able to stop or slow that tide, even if they wanted to. But they likely will have control over how ready their city is to handle it.
