Keith Gerein: Premier Smith's edict is in — Edmonton is not allowed to be Edmonton

Premier Danielle’s Smith announcement last week that her government is forcing Edmonton to throw out its hard-won zoning bylaw is the crowning achievement in a municipal relations record of democratic disrespect, political nihilism, hypocrisy, and shortsightedness.

There is little left of civic autonomy for the UCP government to conquer.

After the province imposed its jurisdictional imperialism on everything from photo radar and bike lanes to regional planning boards and public libraries, Edmonton’s highly successful zoning framework was perhaps the city’s last remaining signature policy — something the UCP regime clearly couldn’t abide.

The premier’s message to the capital city is clear. We are not permitted to manage our own affairs. Our votes don’t matter. Edmonton cannot be allowed to be Edmonton.

As to this latest bigfooting, the city will be given three months to revert back to the pre-2024 version of its zoning bylaw. Council will then have 18 months to review and engage before implementing a new bylaw that must meet provincial standards, whatever those are. Edmonton’s policy on no-parking minimums, which has been in place since 2020, is also being scrapped.

Municipal Affairs Minister Dan Williams calls it “a pause” to stop infill development from going “too fast, too soon,” which is a weird thing to say after the bylaw has been in effect for nearly three years and led to record housing construction. He’s offering no solutions, just a vague demand to go try something else, as if the city hasn’t already been through these debates ad nauseum.

There are several levels of frustration to the government’s move, but much of it hinges on a lack of intellectual integrity.

Last Thursday’s news conference with Smith and Williams was a firehose of misinformation and straw men. It was quickly obvious the leaders hadn’t done their homework, or hadn’t cared to.

For example, neither the premier nor the minister seemed to have much awareness or much regard for the fact that Edmonton’s zoning framework has been a decade-long odyssey. Densification of established neighbourhoods has been one of the central policies of the City Plan, which was released in 2020 and had years of discussion beforehand.

The zoning bylaw itself had five years of work invested before it was put on the table in 2023 and came into effect in 2024. It’s been put through three lengthy public hearings over two council terms, two rounds of amendments (so far), and the meat grinder of a civic election in which infill was one of the leading topics of discussion.

Council has heard from thousands of people, asked countless questions, considered reams of data before and after the bylaw came into force, and debated all the angles. And then made a decision, which is their responsibility as the elected representatives of the city.

It takes some gall for Smith and her heavily rural cabinet to disregard all that and declare they know the issue better than Edmontonians after a few weeks of listening to the NIMBY crowd that lost the last election.

That’s not to say that this isn’t a big change in the city’s development, and clearly unnerving for some established homeowners. As I’ve said before, I think council and city planners did not treat that with appropriate sympathy, and have not been diligent enough in reining in bad builders.

So I don’t blame advocacy groups for pushing their case. But there comes a point when that advocacy crosses a line, as it has here, and results in an self-defeating body blow to municipal self-determination. Some of these folks need to accept that they lost the vote, and that council has still heard them — trust me, they have heard you — but decided to go a different way. Listening should not be conflated with agreement.

Then there is the hypocrisy of this whole thing.

Smith’s constant demands for Ottawa to respect jurisdictional boundaries is the most obvious form of it, but the premier is also on the record in 2024 saying that the fate of Calgary’s zoning bylaw would be left to local voters and that’s she wouldn’t intervene. It also wasn’t long ago when UCP leaders were demanding cities remove red tape on their housing policies.

Either way, whether Smith was being insincere or simply changed her mind, the province’s new edict could end up backfiring.

Edmonton has built a hard-earned reputation as the last affordable major city in Canada, and we’ve remarkably managed to hang onto that despite 250,000 people moving here in the last six years. A lot of credit goes to the zoning framework that has enabled strong residential construction, including a big increase in “missing middle” housing options and locations that cater to lower-income people.

That affordability is key to hanging onto our young people, the city’s economic development efforts, fighting homelessness and its attempts to try to fix the municipal balance sheet. It is disturbing that our provincial government would risk blowing all that up.

Moreover, it’s clear the government did not adequately consider the logistics of this change.

Three months is a very short time to revert back to the old bylaw, a more convoluted framework that has long been absent from the city’s playbook and vocabulary. Some chaos seems inevitable because development officers, city planners, lawyers, subdivision and development appeal board members and more will all need to be trained or retrained on its details. It’s not unlike someone suffering a GPS failure and then having to remember how to navigate with a paper map.

And try this one on for size. Unless the UCP alters municipal rules, any change to the zoning bylaw requires council to first hold a public hearing, which, in this case, would be a meaningless charade because the province has already dictated the outcome.

More crucially, infill developers will be put into a state of limbo for the next two years until the next version of the zoning bylaw is finalized. That may very well delay investment decisions or chase away construction capital to more stable jurisdictions.

Residents cheering this change should also know that the city’s budget projections rely on a tax uplift that was expected from new residential construction. If that uplift is erased, the city will have to compensate by raising taxes or finding cuts. Or housing growth will again be concentrated in new subdivisions, which would be lucrative for certain developers, but not so awesome for the city’s hopes of keeping a sustainable expense ledger. More sprawl, more cost.

Still, as much as the regulatory and financial mayhem will hurt, the biggest concern has to be the city’s worsening subjugation from the occupants of the legislature.

With this latest brazen move, her worst against Edmonton to date, Smith has now proven beyond all doubt that she does not respect the choices of local voters or the primacy of municipalities to design their own communities.

When democracy starts to smell more like autocracy, when the concept of local governance is unmasked as an illusion, then maybe it becomes time to turn out the lights at city hall, lock the doors, and hand over the keys to the premier.

Bookmark our website and support our journalism: Don’t miss the news you need to know — add EdmontonJournal.com and EdmontonSun.com to your bookmarks and sign up for our newsletters here.

You can also support our journalism by becoming a digital subscriber. Subscribers gain unlimited access to The Edmonton Journal, Edmonton Sun, National Post and 13 other Canadian news sites. Support us by subscribing today: The Edmonton Journal | The Edmonton Sun.