Calgary’s self-titled planning document will be kicked down the road once again, with some councillors wanting to scrap it altogether.

During a strategic meeting of council on June 16, councillors voted in favour of pushing a revision of the Calgary Plan to early next year, citing the need for more tweaks to reflect what Calgarians – and council – want out of the overarching city planning document.

The Calgary Plan is an updated version of the Municipal Development Plan (MDP), a planning document that guides long-term growth in the City of Calgary. This version combines the old MDP with three guidebook documents (new community, centre city, developed areas) and the Calgary Transportation Plan (CTP).

While combined the documents are more than 300 pages, the new Calgary Plan is a streamlined version of just under 100 pages. It’s a document that’s been in the works for nearly three years.

Rachelle Dillon with O2 Planning and Design said that in putting together this version of the Calgary Plan, they slimmed down some of the redundant language.

“One of the most effective ways that we found in trimming it was to restructure the plan around simple categories of city building. So, just by aggregating all the parks policies in one spot, all the rec policies, all the growth policies, we were able to pull out those repetition, because the current municipal development plan is first organized by broad strategic direction that has a lot of overlapping Venn diagrams with each other, so there is repetition to ensure that each strategic direction is fulsome,” she said.

While some councillors discussed the wide-ranging changes brought in through the Calgary Plan, there are relatively few major changes, and no zoning changes.

Some of the changes include a shift in the intensity threshold for high activity areas to 150 people+jobs/hectare (from 200), no specific transit-oriented development section, a quantified non-market housing target, a 50/50 development ratio between greenfield and established areas annually rather than in 50 years, and a net-zero emissions by 2050 target.

Blanket Rezoning 2.0: Coun. McLean

Ward 13 Coun. Dan McLean felt the Calgary Plan was too overreaching, and not something Calgarians wanted, especially on the heels of a citywide rezoning repeal.

He called it “blanket rezoning 2.0” and Calgary’s continued “war on cars,” during Tuesday’s strategic meeting of council. He’d prefer Calgary city council scrap the plan.

“Whenever you come up with this large statutory document, it gives direction, that’s a lot of time, a lot of money, a lot of effort going down a direction that I don’t think Calgarians want,” McLean said.

The current MDP was first completed in 2009. It has been updated on a number of occasions since then, with the last update in 2020. City admin said the Calgary Plan update was the first real review in 10 years.

Ward 11 Coun. Rob Ward held up diagrams in council that showed the potential impact of the Calgary Plan on the neighbourhoods in his area and neighbouring Ward 6. When the different elements of the plan were overlaid on his constituency map, it virtually covered all communities.

He felt there was no compelling reason to move the Calgary Plan forward. Ward said that properly crafted amendments to the current MDP would likely suffice. He put forward an amendment to make those improvements.

“I don’t believe that case has been made, and my amendment simply directs administration to focus on improving the existing MDP rather than continuing down the path of replacement,” he said.

“I believe it’s more prudent, fiscally responsible, and an accountable approach.”

That amendment failed at council.

Start of a journey to a rezoning replacement

Ward 6 Coun. John Pantazopoulos said work on the Calgary Plan was the start of a journey council began when it repealed citywide rezoning.

“We’ve done our victory lap around City Hall, and now this is the start of replace,” he said.

After Coun. Ward’s amendment failed, Pantazopoulos put forward a plan to look at the current document and go through some of the revisions councillors wanted to see made. He also wanted to see line of sight on the cost to reach some of the targets included in the plan.

“It’s going to be hard; it’s going to be difficult. We’re going to engage with our constituents, but it’s the right conversation. This is what we were hired for,” he said.

“This is why we’re here. We have to come with a plan that has our stamp, our council’s recommendations, so that when we plan for 30 years, we get to say, ‘hey, we had a choice and a vision of that.’”

Ward 8 Coun. Nathan Schmidt said that ultimately, the Calgary Plan is a template to help city council do more detailed work through planning elements like Local Area Plans.

“I’m really trying to look at this constructively, as far as what is the plan trying to get us to do over the next 20 to 30 years,” he said.  

“The missing piece for me is not really this prescriptive element, but it’s about what are these outcomes, and I think it could do a better job of tying the goals and development to what our goals are for infrastructure, for recreation, for parks.”

While 48,000 people were consulted on this particular version of the plan, Calgary Mayor Jeromy Farkas said that it was important to ensure more citizens were along for the Calgary Plan journey. He said it wasn’t blanket rezoning 2.0, but a sign that council wanted to get things right given the contentious nature of the issue.

“We want to make sure that we’re continuing to grow in a more thoughtful way. We don’t want to repeat the same mistakes that the previous council did through blanket rezoning, but we still need to have a targeted plan,” he said.

Councillors voted 13-2 to come back with a new What We Heard report in January 2027 before moving ahead to a potential public hearing.