Don Iveson.
In a six-week series of interviews, Canadians with a variety of experiences discuss the major challenges our country is facing and how best to address them. This instalment deals with building healthy communities.
Edmonton Mayor Don Iveson was interviewed July 24 by Brenna Atnikov, a consultant with Reos Partners.
Atnikov: If you could talk with a clairvoyant about the future of Canada, what would you most want to know?
Iveson: What an opportunity. How will climate change affect this country in the coming decades? I worry that Canada may be less resilient to it because of scale. The vastness of the country is one of the things that makes us beautiful and means we have massive resources to benefit from. But because things are so spread out, we have thousands of miles of roads and pipes. All of that stuff is potentially vulnerable to changes in climate.
The other thing I would ask is: Where are we with reconciliation with indigenous people? Because that's one of the huge unfinished pieces of work in this country. In spite of all the attempts to assimilate them, we haven't been successful, and it's only because of the resilience of the indigenous people that they're still here.
A third question would be: Does the country still exist or does it break apart because there's nothing pulling it together any more? We've become allergic to constitutional crises, but other countries go through them and they're healthy. It's like a marriage – if you let everything fester, and then you finally say what you think, it's hard to work things out.
If we can fight it out as a country and come out stronger, we're good. But we seem to avoid some of the conversations we need to have.
Atnikov: What do you see as the opportunities and challenges facing Edmonton?
Iveson: The Conference Board of Canada projects us to be the fastest-growing city, both in GDP and population, over the next three years. If we're going to add 30,000 to 40,000 people a year, that requires a lot of physical and social construction. Edmonton is one of the few places in the world where people can be prosperous and also still participate in genuine community building.
At the same time, I'm not willing to say that everything is rosy. We're decades behind in the construction of libraries and recreation centres. Many of our new areas will be incomplete communities for some years. So as fun as it is to be a part of all of this growth, there is some triage involved.
Also, Edmonton will shortly have the largest urban aboriginal population in the country. Many of the families coming here are doing well; however, for complex historical reasons, some are not. The aboriginal population is overrepresented among people living in poverty, and nearly half of our homeless population is aboriginal.
Atnikov: How has resource wealth contributed to that complexity?
Iveson: If any jurisdiction ought to have the resources to keep up with growth, it would be Alberta. But the boom-and-bust cycle of using resource revenues to pay for expenditures is incredibly risky. You can't choose to fund all-day kindergarten and then, when oil drops below a certain price per barrel, eliminate all-day kindergarten. We made missteps in the past, first by allowing development to get out of control, and then by allowing the extractive business to crowd out the value-added business.
Moving forward, if we're going to pursue the oil sands business, we need to learn from our past mistakes and demonstrate that we can be good stewards of this complex resource that we've inherited by chance. The activity is going to happen; as long as oil is higher than about $50 a barrel, the extraction will continue. We need to orient ourselves single-mindedly to making it cheaper, cleaner, greener, faster and safer, and then we need to apply that intellectual property to other environmental challenges and industrial processes around the world. That should be our next nation-building project – create long-term value out of this one-time benefit. So when we're done up north, when we've extracted the last of the extractable, economically feasible resource, there's still some reason for Edmonton to exist.
Possible Canadas is a project created by Reos Partners, the J.W. McConnell Family Foundation and a diverse coalition of philanthropic and community organizations. For longer versions of these interviews, or to join the conversation, visit possiblecanadas.ca