City Council is trying to change the way we live. This year will see the creation of a bylaw restricting the cosmetic use of pesticides and the initiation of mandatory curbside recycling. (Well, you don’t actually have to recycle, but the fee will appear on your utility bill, regardless). And if Alderman John Mar gets his way, this will also be the year council phases out single-use plastic shopping bags.
Calgary isn’t exactly breaking new regulatory ground. San Francisco was the first big city to ban plastic shopping bags about two years ago. The idea has since spread to London and Paris, and visitors to the Olympics in Beijing last summer found only durable, reusable plastic bags.
The proposed bag embargo comes on the heels of some other high-profile bans. Last summer saw London, Ont., ban the sale of bottled water in all municipal buildings; Bridgewater, N.S., made the news by banning smoking in city-owned parks, a step back from council’s original attempt to ban smoking on public streets, as well.
The trend seems to be that once you open the door to mandating the public’s behaviour, more rules are waiting in the wings. This year, San Francisco plans to lead the pack once again, making it mandatory for all residents to recycle and compost.
These developments have left some Calgarians worried about future bylaws, and wondering if council doesn’t have something better to do with its time than meddle in our backyards and garbage bins.
However, it has been a leisurely 21 years since Edmonton first introduced its curbside recycling program — and Calgary’s just starting. Other new ideas, such as the bike-share program, adopted in Europe and in other parts of Canada, have been quashed by Calgary City Council long before they could take shape or gather momentum.
Calgary’s ban on the cosmetic use of pesticides will be the first in Alberta, but more than 135 other Canadian municipalities acted first. The incessant lobbying of prominent groups such as the David Suzuki Foundation, the Alberta College of Family Physicians, the Council of Canadians, the Sierra Club and the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment was not enough to prompt action until just recently.
On the other hand, you can’t say Calgary suffers from a lack of vision. Few cities could summon the energy for projects such as the 10-year Plan to End Homelessness, or ImagineCalgary, which pushed Calgarians to articulate everything their city could be in 100 years time. The conclusion was summed up in the motto, “Calgary: a great place to make a living, a great place to make a life.”
City Council has also shown that it’s not afraid of innovation. Last year, Calgary’s Centre City Plan won the national 2008 Award for Planning Excellence in Downtown Planning, granted by the Canadian Institute of Planners.
Brent Toderian, director of planning with the City of Vancouver, explains: “It’s already being considered one of the most progressive downtown plans anywhere because of its holistic nature.” Calgary’s Plan is to create a richly textured city centre that meshes livability, interest and excitement with enough social supports necessary to address the root causes of big-city problems, such as the addiction, homelessness and crime, which plague Calgary’s East Village.
And, still, the stereotype of Calgarians is that we don’t like to be told what to do. Born and raised in Calgary, and having served one year so far on council, Mar thinks he knows where that resistance comes from, and says so by reinforcing city slogans.
“We’re the ‘Heart of the New West.’ We’re very much a pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps society,” he says. “There’s also a very strong laissez-faire attitude in Calgary.”
Which implies, “Don’t interfere.”
“We’re probably the most Americanized city in Canada,” adds Mar. “In some ways, we’re a lot like Denver. We have a very ‘Yes we can’ attitude and we’re largely a resource-based economy.” We’re unlike Houston where, he says, “there are no permits, no planning. You build what you want to build on that piece of dirt. It’s very much the Wild West.”
Toderian, who until recently worked for the City of Calgary in planning new neighbourhoods, agrees. “Historically,” he says, “Calgary has had a mindset, more so than any other Canadian city, of, ‘The private sector knows best, the market knows best and government’s job is to facilitate private sector or market activity.’ ”
The fact that Calgarians are both visionaries and contrarians complicates the work of council, which ultimately has to decide what policies are worth spending limited time and resources on. While Mar can’t confirm rumours of deep divisions on council, he does concede “council is certainly divided in terms of inner city and outer city.”
But City Council’s pressure is more entrenched than that. According to Dr. James Lightbody, a political science professor at the University of Alberta specializing in metropolitan reform, the last 40 years have seen an international movement toward balancing books with less government.
“Paul Martin balanced the federal budget by cutting back on grants to the provinces. Then the provinces balanced their books by cutting back
on municipalities,” Lightbody says. “Alberta has certainly been one of the more extreme cases.”
And while all municipalities have felt the effects as grants dried up, Lightbody suggests the larger municipalities felt a greater impact.
The calgarymayor.ca website, run by the City of Calgary, sums up the resulting dilemma: “If the other orders of government don’t — or won’t — handle it, we do.” And they do so with only eight cents of every tax dollar collected by all three levels of government.
According to Mar, when City Council did its budget for 2009 to 2011, there were “$10 billion in wants on the table.” He adds, wryly, “Our operating budget is $2.2 billion.”
Unfortunately, in this time of balancing needs and wants, the general public remains passive. Voter turnout for the 2007 municipal election, while up from 19.8 per cent in 2004, was a scant 33 per cent.
The lack of interest in municipal politics, says Lightbody, “pushes councillors who like to play the game, to get their name out.” A new bylaw — for example, Mar’s proposed ban on plastic bags — is one way to get your name in the headlines and separate yourself from the herd.
When you can’t figure out how to do more with less and you can’t get substantial numbers out to vote, some councillors, Lightbody says, settle for the appearance of doing something, anything.
What cities really need, he suggests, is substantive policy, not “symbolic bylaws.” Lightbody sees banning plastic bags as knee-jerkism that trivializes environmental issues and diverts attention from the serious things that cities could do, a course of action that feeds into apathy.
“When they want us to buy into something that is important, we ignore them,” he says, adding that his vision for a strong municipality is one that takes the lead, just in a different way. “Leadership would be getting hybrid buses on the road, [being] sensitive to the environment when issuing development permits and requiring that all festivals in the city be green.
Now, that’s innovative and sensible.”
But Mar makes no apologies for the symbolic nature of his proposed bylaw. “It is somewhat symbolic,” he says, “but it’s also a very strong environmental stewardship platform.”
Single-use plastic bags (an oil-based product) are, according to Mar, a “completely unnecessary waste.” Banning them, so the rationale goes, would express how strong Calgary feels about arriving at the limits of a disposable society.
Mar is also open about wanting to separate himself from the chaff. During the pesticide debate, Mayor Dave Bronconnier chided council for allow-ing the public to get so far ahead of their municipal leaders. “With plastic bags,” Mar says, “I want to be ahead of the curve.”
In the alderman’s mind, spearheading social responsibility is the position he was elected to take. “People have hired us specifically for leadership,” says Mar. “We’ve been asked by the citizens of Calgary to put forth our ideas and our platform, and to say, ‘This is what we believe.’”
In Toderian’s world, sustainability includes increasing the density of housing and planning communities around pedestrians, cyclists and transit riders. But he agrees council has to be willing to get out ahead of its citizens and the private sector in the name of sustainability — that it’s the government’s job to educate, to challenge and to test the thresholds and the limits of tolerance for change.
From his unique vantage, Toderian sees council moving in the right direction. “The last couple of years in Calgary have been about taking that can-do innovative attitude and growing it in City Hall,” he says. “Calgary’s reputation has been changing from a reputation for conservatism and private-sector-knows-best, to a reputation involving some pretty strong urban leadership.”
Social researcher Merrill Cooper also sees something in Calgary’s leadership that has not been there before. “The current council is more willing
to entertain initiatives and policies that may result in significant and positive social change than many past councils,” she says.
It’s easy to look to the big projects — the Centre City Plan, for example — to find proof of progressive social change. However, vision and innovation can show up in some pretty small places.
To wit: the riddance of plastic shopping bags.
“Historically,” Cooper says, “public attitudes have shifted in response to small legislative changes. They set the tone for further policy debate. They begin to shift policy in another direction.”
While she agrees with Lightbody that cities need substantive change in order to move social policy forward, Cooper stresses it isn’t just a case of Go Big or Go Home. “Small and symbolic changes can pave the road for more significant policy shifts,” she says, adding that new bylaws to encourage social responsibility may be changing Calgarians, too. “There can be a symbiotic relationship between public attitudes and legislation.”
In the 1980s, the western world was still fighting a menacing Cold War with the Soviet Union. In 1988, the Calgary Disarmament Coalition attended meetings and lobbied City Council until Calgary was declared a nuclear weapons-free zone. Since defence is a federal issue, the declaration was primarily symbolic.
The Grain Exchange Building put up a sign, as did the YWCA, declaring themselves nuclear weapons-free zones. Some homes and backyards were declared nuclear weapons-free zones, as well.
“It wasn’t particularly pragmatic,” recalls peace activist Yvonne Stanford, “but the threat of nuclear war was real. There were times when we were seconds away from war, and stopping that war was the most urgent thing.”
Declaring Calgary a nuclear weapons-free zone was an opportunity to educate people about the arms race and the need to disarm, says Stanford. But more than that, “It was an action people could take to build a movement toward a national policy.”
While Stanford admits the timelines for saving the planet from environmental Armageddon are longer than they were during the Cold War, “there is a similar urgency in the environmental movement today.”
Maybe after 40 years of less government, we’re ready for more of it. As the city grows and the planet feels smaller, we could very well find that a bylaw banning single-use plastic bags, or even one banning the sale of bottled water, makes as much common sense now as older bylaws — such as the ban that prevented Calgarians from keeping bovines, camels, reindeer, emus and moose inside the city limits, and the one that disallowed archery and the use of explosives in public parks — did then.
What is clear is we need new kinds of bylaws for a new kind of city. What is less clear is what the new initiatives will look like, how they will perform, and what City Council defines as common sense.
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