Calgary Minute: Council Returns, School Returns, and Yet More Calls For Higher Taxes

Calgary Minute - Your weekly one-minute summary of Calgary politics

This Week In Calgary:

• Calgary Council's month-long summer break will come to an end on Wednesday morning with a meeting of the Standing Policy Committee on Planning and Urban Development. The Committee will review the Off-site Levy and Centre City Levy 2019 Annual Report, Amendments to the Airport Vicinity Protection Area, a Multiple Municipal Historic Resource Designation report, and more.
  
  
• On Thursday morning there will be a meeting of the Intergovernmental Affairs Committee, but no agenda is available for this meeting yet.
  
  
• On Thursday afternoon there will be a meeting of the Calgary Planning Commission. The Commission will review a number of Policy Amendments, Development Permits, and Land Use Amendments.

Last Week In Calgary:

• After a cabinet shuffle left municipalities with a new Minister of Municipal Affairs, Tracy Allard, City Officials ran straight to the press to announce their hopes for a "reset". Of course, what they actually mean is that they see this as yet another opportunity to demand more and higher taxes - something the former minister, Kaycee Madu, had repeatedly ruled out. The last thing Alberta taxpayers need is a "reset" to the times when the province let municipalities hike taxes on residents year after year after year. Municipalities should stick to their core job, and keep taxes low.
  
  
• More than 21,000 (about 16%) of Calgary Board of Education students won't be attending school in person this fall. The same goes for more than 5,000 Calgary Catholic School District students. Interestingly, this is much lower than in Edmonton where almost 30% of students in the Edmonton Public School Board have enrolled for online learning.
  
  
• A new study has found that, amid COVID, many more Canadians are looking for properties with more space, a large yard, or extra amenities such as a pool, and they're happy to move to the suburbs or rural areas to get them. Nobody knows what the long-term impact of COVID will be on people's housing preferences but, as the City of Calgary continues to push for high-density housing, the futility of top-down government predictions has once again been exposed as nonsense. We need housing choices to be led by free markets and prices, not government intervention.

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