New ‘Calgary Plan’ puts ideology above the needs of residents

Danny Randell
Calgary Herald
December 14, 2024

The City of Calgary’s recently released Calgary Plan is meant to detail the next three decades of municipal development. Instead, the 156-page document devotes a lot of attention to the idea that Calgary is a systemically racist city.

To wit, the word “equity” appears in the plan more than 50 times, while “affordability” surfaces a mere four times and “families” just once. This, despite a recent news poll that found 70 per cent of Calgarians do not think their city is affordable.

Either this report was not made for a public audience or its authors think Calgarians care more about ideological fads than whether their city is functional and one of the top 10 places in Canada to raise a family.

The Calgary Plan comes on the heels of the city’s Anti-Racism Strategic Plan published last year; a document that asserts, “systemic racism is evident across various institutions . . . (and) is apparent in municipal government.” The Calgary Plan strikes a similar tone, and dedicates whole pages to Truth and Reconciliation along with equity and inclusion. This, in a document meant to inform Calgarians about the changes and growth happening in their city.

The idea of systemic racism has become popular in recent years, with even the prime minister declaring Canada a systemically racist country. Surely if Canada is a systemically racist country, then Calgary must also be — or so goes the logic of our elected council and their municipal myrmidons.

Except Canada is not a systemically racist country.

As a recent Aristotle Foundation study shows, systemic discrimination was outlawed decades ago. Federally, the first law banning racial discrimination was passed in 1953, and by the 1970s every province and territory in Canada had passed anti-discrimination legislation.

Likewise, the majority of those in poverty in this country do not belong to what the city calls a “racialized group,” but are, in fact, white. Further, Statistics Canada data shows that a number of minority groups achieve higher levels of income and education than white Canadians.

If systemic racism, as the City of Calgary defines it, “equips a racial group with the power to dominate others in social, political and economic areas,” shouldn’t this “domination” be borne out in the data?

If Calgary was systemically racist, would it be the home of Canada’s first major-city Muslim mayor, Naheed Nenshi? Or his successor, Jyoti Gondek, herself the daughter of Indian immigrants? According to the city’s own logic, Nenshi and Gondek’s white competitors should have “dominated” every mayoral race since 2010 — they didn’t.

Research shows that the only form of racism permitted in Canada is reverse racism (or “affirmative action”), which discriminates against the majority population in favour of historically marginalized groups. Affirmative action is the reason some job postings in Canada are reserved for BIPOC individuals, and why it’s perfectly legal for Toronto Metropolitan (formerly, Ryerson) University to select medical school applicants based on the colour of their skin.

Back to The Calgary Plan, which states that: “Past discriminatory and racially unjust planning processes and practices about how land is used . . . have built and reinforced systemic barriers.”

Really?

Were any “racially unjust planning processes” to blame for the city’s water main break in June? Or was it simply a failure on the part of municipal workers that the last time the Bearspaw South feeder had been drained and properly inspected was in 2007?

Inspecting and installing water lines are the kinds of things a municipal planning team ought to be concerned about amid Calgary’s historic population growth, not whether the planning process conforms to the latest ideological fads. While city bureaucrats were presumably busy compiling this report last summer, Calgarians went for days without showers and weeks without watering their gardens.

A word of advice to the city: focus on making the next “plan” for Calgary work for residents, instead of promoting ideas that aren’t rooted in reality.

Danny Randell is a researcher at the Aristotle Foundation for Public Policy.

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