Calgary city council is preparing to hold its fourth major planning hearing in five years — but has never shown Calgarians what it learned from the first three.
In the coming months, Calgary city council will ask Calgarians to participate in a public hearing on the proposed Calgary Plan, a document intended to streamline Calgary’s Municipal Development Plan (MDP) and combine it with the Calgary Transportation Plan, which will guide how our city grows for decades to come.
The timing of this proposal naturally raises a broader question. Calgary’s existing Municipal Development Plan was adopted in 2009 following extensive public engagement and was substantially updated through the City’s “Next 20” initiative in 2021—less than four years ago.
Several members of council have questioned whether a compelling case has yet been made for replacing the existing MDP rather than continuing to improve it through amendments.
Council will ultimately decide whether Calgary requires an entirely new Municipal Development Plan or whether the existing MDP should instead be further refined. That procedural decision is important, but it is not the central issue.
Regardless of the path council chooses, Calgary’s long-term planning framework should demonstrably reflect the observations, recommendations, and planning principles that emerged from the three public hearings and explain how that evidence shaped the final document.
Before asking Calgarians to participate in a fourth major statutory planning hearing, council should ask one simple question:
What have we learned from the first three public hearings?
This is not another debate about blanket upzoning. It is about institutional learning. That is how public participation builds better planning—and how public trust is earned.
Critical evidence from public hearings must be incorporated into the Calgary Plan
Over the past five years, Calgary has held three of the most significant statutory planning hearings in its history: the Guidebook for Great Communities hearing (2021), the blanket upzoning hearing (2024), and the blanket upzoning repeal hearing (2026). Together, they produced one of the largest bodies of direct, grassroots planning evidence ever presented to Calgary City Council.
Unlike surveys, workshops, or facilitated consultation sessions, statutory public hearings allow residents to determine which issues matter most to them. Residents prepare their own submissions and present them directly to council in a public forum.
The hearing record is also not filtered through summaries or predetermined questions. It provides an unusually candid picture of what Calgarians value and how they believe their city should grow.
Importantly, the same themes emerged repeatedly across all three hearings.
Residents consistently argued that growth should be coordinated with infrastructure capacity rather than simply assumed. They emphasized that community-specific conditions matter and that neighbourhoods cannot all be planned as though they are interchangeable.
They repeatedly identified mature trees and Calgary’s urban canopy as defining community assets deserving stronger protection. Many questioned whether concentrating growth in established communities could gradually erode the very qualities that make those neighbourhoods attractive places to live.
Participants also distinguished between increasing housing supply and improving housing affordability, arguing that the two should not be treated as synonymous.
Finally, they repeatedly emphasized that meaningful public participation requires residents to understand how their input influences planning decisions.
When these same concerns consistently emerge across multiple statutory public hearings over the years, they become more than isolated objections. They are evidence of Calgary’s emerging civic consensus about how growth should occur, what should be protected, and the safeguards that should accompany change.
This is critical evidence that must be considered and incorporated into the Calgary Plan. At minimum, council should require city administration to demonstrate how it was evaluated, balanced against other planning considerations, and reflected in the policies that guide Calgary’s future.
Rebuilding public trust through quality engagement
The importance of demonstrating how public evidence influences planning decisions is reinforced by the City’s own independent review of public engagement.
Last year, Calgary commissioned KPMG to examine why so many residents lacked confidence in the City’s engagement processes. The findings were sobering. Almost four in five Calgarians surveyed said they did not trust the City’s engagement process.
KPMG concluded that the problem was not the absence of engagement opportunities, but the absence of a clear explanation of how public participation influenced decisions. The report recommended improving transparency by demonstrating how public input was considered, building on previous engagement rather than repeatedly collecting the same information, and ensuring that residents understand how their contributions shaped policy outcomes.
Those recommendations are directly relevant to the Calgary Plan. If the City is seeking to rebuild public confidence, Calgary’s principal statutory planning document should demonstrate how the substantial body of evidence has influenced the city’s preeminent planning document.
The draft Calgary Plan states that it reflects input from Calgarians and that planning decisions will be evidence-based. However, in preparing its research document for city council, Calgarians for Thoughtful Growth was unable to identify any discussion of how the extensive evidence received during the Guidebook, blanket upzoning, or repeal hearings informed the development of the Plan.
That omission goes to the heart of public confidence.
Evidence evaluated and considered – not necessarily accepted
The issue is not whether every submission should have been accepted. The issue is whether Council—and the public—can see how this extraordinary body of public evidence was evaluated and reflected in Calgary’s long-term planning framework.
In many respects, the Calgary Plan contains positive policies. It recognizes the importance of quality urban design, ecological protection, complete communities, and long-term infrastructure planning.
The concern is not that the plan lacks merit, but that it does not demonstrate how years of thoughtful public participation shaped those policies or where recurring public concerns were accepted, modified, or rejected.
The upcoming Calgary Plan public hearing offers council an important opportunity—but the work needs to begin before that hearing even starts.
Before reviewing and adopting Calgary’s next Municipal Development Plan, council should require administration to demonstrate, to them and the public, how the evidence received during the previous three public hearings—and the lessons identified in the KPMG review—have informed the plan.
Ultimately, this is about more than producing a better planning document.
It is also about strengthening public confidence that when thousands of Calgarians devote their time, energy, and expertise to shaping the future of their city, their voices do not simply become part of the record – they become part of the plan.
This op-ed column was contributed by Calgarians for Thoughtful Growth – Rusty Miller, Lisa Poole, Robert Lehodey, K.C., Patti McCunn-Miller, Jennifer Baldwin, and Chris Davis.
