You Now Know More Than Most Calgarians. Here's What to Do With It.

What You've Just Learned

Over the past five posts you've covered ground that most Calgarians — including many people who work at city hall — haven't connected into a single picture. Let's bring it together.

Calgary has an 8% tree canopy, one of the lowest of any major Canadian city, distributed so unequally that some communities have 25% coverage while others have under 3%. That gap is not natural — it's the accumulated result of 130 years of planning decisions that consistently prioritized established, wealthier communities over newer, more diverse ones.

Fixing it is genuinely hard. The soil is wrong. The utilities are in the way. The climate is unforgiving. The regulatory tools are incomplete. The political will is inconsistent. The money, when it arrives, flows toward the easy places rather than the necessary ones.

And the cost of not fixing it is paid in heat, in health, in the daily experience of living in a neighbourhood that the city has never fully invested in — paid disproportionately by newcomers, by lower-income families, by racialized communities, by the people least able to absorb it.

Why Your Voice Is Different From an Expert's

There are experts working on this problem. Urban foresters, climate scientists, planners, councillors, community organizers. Their knowledge is real and valuable. But expertise has a blind spot — it tends to optimize for what is technically feasible and administratively manageable rather than what is actually needed and wanted by the people most affected.

The residents of Saddle Ridge know things about what it feels like to live without shade that no urban forestry report captures. The homeowner whose neighbour refuses to trim a hazardous tree knows something about the practical failure of the current bylaw framework that no policy paper documents. The newcomer family whose children can't play outside on hot summer afternoons knows something about the stakes of this issue that doesn't show up in canopy coverage statistics.

That knowledge — grounded, local, lived — is exactly what this process is designed to surface and take seriously.

Three Things You Can Do Right Now

1. Submit a Proposal

The Proposals section is open. You don't need to be a planner or a politician. You need to have an idea, however small or large, about what Calgary should do differently. A proposal can be as specific as "require soil rehabilitation funding in the five lowest-canopy communities before the end of 2026" or as broad as "commit to a binding ward-by-ward equity target for the 930,000 tree program." If it's a real idea that addresses a real problem, it belongs here.

2. Endorse What You Agree With

Browse the proposals others have submitted and endorse the ones you support. Endorsements matter — they signal to the city which ideas have genuine public support behind them, and they help surface the strongest proposals for the debate and prioritization phases.

3. Bring Someone With You

The communities most affected by Calgary's canopy gap are also the communities least likely to find their way to a civic engagement platform on their own. If you live in or know people in a low-canopy neighbourhood — Saddle Ridge, Cityscape, Cornerstone, Martindale, any of the communities in Ward 5 and the outer northeast — share this process with them directly. Their voice in this process is more valuable than almost anyone else's, and it won't get here by accident.

What Happens to Your Input

This process is not a survey that disappears into a filing cabinet. Every proposal submitted here will receive an official response — accepted, in progress, or not adopted, with a reason given for each decision. The final synthesis report will be submitted directly to Calgary City Council and the Urban Forestry team. The participatory budget results will be shared with the councillors responsible for allocating the federal planting funds.

We can't guarantee that every idea will become policy. But we can guarantee that every idea will be heard, documented, and responded to — and that the aggregate of what Calgarians decide in this process will be part of the public record on Calgary's urban forest strategy going forward.

The Bigger Picture

Alberta Commons exists because civic information in this city is fragmented, inaccessible, and written for insiders. The tree canopy issue is one example of a much larger pattern — decisions that profoundly affect people's daily lives being made in processes that most people don't know exist, in language most people can't parse, with participation mechanisms that favour those who already have time, connections, and familiarity with how city hall works.

That is what this platform is trying to change. Not just for trees. For everything.

You're part of that now. Make it count.

→ Go to Proposals → Go to Debates → Share this process