New Report Reveals Significant Economic Harm Caused By Proposed Calgary Region Growth Plan
Press Release
For Immediate Release
September 14th, 2021
The Alberta Institute has today released an independent, in-depth analysis of the economic impact of the Calgary Metropolitan Region Board’s proposed Growth Plan.
The Calgary Metropolitan Region Board was announced by the Alberta government in 2015 and formally came into existence on January 1st, 2018.
The Board’s proposed Growth Plan for development in the Calgary region is currently in the hands of the provincial government, awaiting a decision about the future of the Board and the plan itself.
The report released today is the only assessment of the proposed Growth Plan that has been commissioned by anyone other than the Calgary Metropolitan Region Board themselves and finds significant weaknesses in the analysis and assessments conducted by the Board.
Under this Growth Plan, the Board would effectively act as a fourth layer of government on planning and development issues, requiring almost all planning and development matters that are proposed in the Calgary region to be approved not just by the local municipality in which the project is located, but also by the Calgary Metropolitan Region Board as a whole.
This plan is set to radically alter how the Calgary region operates, imposing top-down centralized control on planning in the region at the expense of local decision-making, democratic accountability, competition, and choice.
“The proposed growth plan would block billions of dollars of investment, redirect billions more out of the Calgary region, and cost tens of thousands of jobs. This is the exact opposite of what the Calgary region needs right now,” said Peter McCaffrey, the President of the Alberta Institute and author of the report.
“The Calgary Metropolitan Region Board, and the requirement for them to create a Growth Plan to control development in the region, were an ideological creation of the former provincial government, based on the idea that top-down central planning is the best way to run an economy. There is no evidence, anywhere in the world, that this is the case, and the current government should reverse this mistake as soon as possible”, added McCaffrey.
The full report, along with an Executive Summary, is available on the Alberta Institute website.
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