The risk to Calgary’s capital infrastructure has jumped to the highest possible spot on the principal corporate risks heat map, indicating it’s almost certain, extensive, and a failure will have a severe impact.

That’s delivered in the 2025 Year-End Principal Corporate Risk Report coming to Calgary’s Audit Committee on Jan. 22, and councillors believe this kind of high-profile escalation may have been overlooked by both admin and council in the past.

The corporate risk profile is supposed to offer a single, integrated view of corporate risks, according to the report.

“The City’s risk profile is trending upwards,” the document reads.

“Further, the City’s risk environment is highly dynamic, volatile, and from which emerging risks arise with increasing velocity.”

The report said that ongoing pressures from aging infrastructure and higher-than-expected population growth are long-term stressors. It indicated that financial controls are stable, though increased financial certainty is ahead, due to the risks.

While several areas in the corporate risk heat map are in the likely, high and significant risk portions (reputation, social wellbeing and accommodating growth), capital infrastructure made the jump to almost certain, extensive and severe.

The report said the City’s understanding of risk to critical infrastructure was changed with the 2025 Bearspaw South feeder main rupture.

“There is an urgent need to understand and mitigate critical infrastructure risk across all asset types where potential impacts are high to extensive,” the report read.

“In addition, rising project costs, aging infrastructure and labour shortage pressures persist, which are compounded by pressures related to growth.”

Roughly 11 per cent of Calgary’s infrastructure (including water, IT, fleet, buildings, bridges and roads ) is in poor or very poor condition, the City of Calgary said.

Calgary’s corporate risk profile, while it comes annually as an update to councillors, also followed the recent Bearspaw South feeder main independent review, which highlighted more than 20 years of poor risk management and infrastructure oversight.

More detail, reformed process needed: Councillors

Ward 5 Coun. Raj Dhaliwal said that he met with Calgary’s Chief Administrative Officer, David Duckworth, and told him that the jump to “excessive” meant little to him.

“It’s just a heat map,” he said.

“I want a holistic picture. What are the infrastructures, our wastewater, our vehicles, e fleet. What is at excessive risk, give us the details. Because this means nothing; that report is full of commentary without details.”

Dhaliwal said he’d like to know exactly what comprises the 11 per cent of Calgary infrastructure that is in poor or very poor condition, what mitigation is in place, or what recommendations are being made for replacement.  He wants an asset-by-asset breakdown, along with the consequences of failure.

“We can prioritize risk mitigation process, and we can properly look at our enterprise-wide reserve funds to help the mitigation process or elimination of these risks,” he said.

Ward 8 Coun. Nathan Schmidt said that his initial thoughts on the report were that there’s been a failure in managing the city in a pragmatic way that allows information to flow up from the subject matter experts.

“There’s clearly some missing pieces here that it’s going to be this council’s job to get those puzzle pieces in place so that there is more consistent reporting and transparency for the public as well,” Schmidt said.

Schmidt said there’s been a risk management policy at the City of Calgary since 2004, but there’s been a breakdown in that there’s little follow-through from that. He noted that the Bearspaw panel said that while there were breakdowns in information sharing, they said that City of Calgary workers were dedicated and knowledgeable.

“We need to… take those pieces and put them together so that we can enable the high level of knowledge and motivation that exists in city administration to bring that knowledge to the public and to council on a more regular basis,” he said.

Fixing the process to bring this forward isn’t going to be easy, Schmidt said. He said it will require council and city administration to get on the same page in terms of reporting and acting on the infrastructure risk.

That will likely have budgetary impacts, Schmidt said. For him, reports like this and the Bearspaw independent review will have a huge influence on budget decisions.

“It’s like the triangle of, how do we connect administration, council and the public into this, where everybody has the same level of visibility,” he said.

“Then at the final part of this, it comes to council, and then it’s on council to recognize that risk and make decisions based on that risk.”

Dhaliwal wants all of the departmental risk registers to come to council for budget time, so mistakes or oversight from the past don’t cause bigger problems in the future.

“If infrastructure is high on our to-do list, and to fix the nuts and bolts of the city, we need to fully understand what those risks are, and that enterprise integrated risk register should be part of those discussions with a proper, updated one,” he said.

Calgary city council also has a Strategic Meeting of Council on Jan. 21 to discuss the foundations for the upcoming four-year budget.