There could be a slight hiccup in the counting of souls within Calgary, largely due to the inability to find a contractor who can carry out the census work.

Members of Calgary’s Executive Committee will consider a potential switch to a city-led census in 2028, instead of a contractor-led census in 2027. The latter option was initially approved back in 2024.

According to the city admin report, no full-service contractor could be found during their Request for Information.

“However, after completing an RFI, Administration did not find any contractors that offer a complete delivery model, and experience for contractors working in large cities was limited,” their report read.

Calgary’s civic census was one of the casualties of the city’s Solutions for Achieving Value and Excellence (SAVE) program back in 2020. That was a program meant to find city savings when Calgarians were looking for a property tax break. At that time, it was proposed to save the City of Calgary $900,000 annually.  The city’s last head count happened in 2019.

Since that time, it’s repeatedly been brought up as a missing tool to help guide the delivery of City of Calgary services. The city has been relying on the quadrennial federal census to navigate population growth in the meantime.

After an evaluation, while a contractor-led process would meet council timelines, have a lower start-up cost, and provide data more swiftly, it also presented risks around implementation, data security, and confusion over data being released at the same time as the federal census.

The City of Calgary noted there would be a higher start-up cost associated with process and software development for an in-house census system. Admin said it would come back with a funding requirement to be considered in the 2027-2030 budget.

Work has been ongoing to develop a civic census plan, with city staff, school board participation, and academics with knowledge of successful delivery of a census.

Federal census buys time, says Vibrant Communities Calgary

A delay in having detailed data can make it harder for some local organizations to make resource decisions of their own.

Alka Merlin, director of communication with Vibrant Communities Calgary, a poverty reduction non-profit organization, said that they understand the practical realities involved in delivering something large like a census, and not having a contractor who can carry out the work.

“With the federal census happening this year, and the results coming out next year, I think it buys us a little bit of time,” she said.

Vibrant Calgary has long advocated for updated census information to help it understand community needs and make evidence-based decisions.

“The longer the gap between that local data collection, the harder it becomes to measure that change and respond more effectively,” Merlin said.  

“Without a municipal census, from our perspective, given the work that we do… we don’t have as much certainty about how demands are shifting for services across the city. Especially whether there’s emerging areas of poverty developing outside of what we would consider traditionally vulnerable communities, or which neighbourhoods are growing the fastest.”

Ward 4 Coun. DJ Kelly, who is the vice-chair of the Executive Committee, said that even a one-year delay presents problems. He said it’s a big issue on several fronts.

“The census is obviously crucial for the City of Calgary, in order to be able to figure out exactly where we need to be delivering services and which services should be delivered across the city,” he told LWC.

“A delay, even by a year, impacts our ability to make sure that we are delivering those services at the appropriate place and at the appropriate time.”

He said the federal census helps a little bit, but the reason why the municipal census is being brought back is that the federal census data wasn’t granular enough.

“It helps soften that blow of the year delay, but it just is an extension of the problem that we’ve had for the past six years, which is essentially we don’t have the level of detail that we really need to in order to be able to make local decisions,” he said.

Ward 5 Coun. Raj Dhaliwal said that any delay in a civic census is disappointing, particularly because city administration has had this file for nearly two years.

“They’re coming to us now, saying, ‘well, we can’t find someone who is suitable to do this.’ It’s concerning, and if it’s internal, then we need to know what are the pros and cons of that, and what kind of data we can collect,” he said.

Specifically, he wanted to know if the data collected would just be similar to that of the biannual citizen satisfaction survey or if it would be scientific-type data.

If the Executive Committee approves the admin recommendation, it would then go to a full meeting of Calgary city council for final approval.