Calgarians Against the City of Calgary...

Blanket Rezoning.

Having sat through the challenge against blanket rezoning earlier this week, Richard Harrison, for the plaintiffs, made some very compelling arguments…Chan for the City, attempting to pick apart…

On the Citizens Side, 3 points were raised:

• Councilor Bias - Gian-Carlo Carra - throughout the testimony at the blanket rezoning hearing, earlier this year;

• Decisions being made not according to process;

• Vires - city stepped beyond contours, rendering the bylaw invalid.

On side with affidavit in hand regarding councilor bias, by Gian-Carlo Carra, was George Clark - testifying that Carra had dismissed any and all testimony with the 736 presenters calling them all racists and blowhards…adding in that 3 amendments made to the blanket rezoning were universally passed by majority, where Carra was either the only vote against in 2 of them and had one additional councilor vote with him on against the amendment on the third.

Add to this, Carra has apparently spent years studying high-density housing and that the studies brought forward, testimony in favor of this idea, was introduced as Carra calling himself a Member of the Team, with these being the information that WE brought forward.

Doesn’t sound biased at all, does it?

Defense brought up the fact that some of Clarks testimony wasn’t consistent with his online Twitter Posts and that councilors cannot be made to answer to every shit poster on the internet, referring to George as a ‘Blogger’, in general context.

The city had also made case that their decision was in keeping with processes on large parcels of rezoning and taking appropriate actions - citing a case where 500 lots could be mass rezoned - where this number, through Blanket Rezoning was effectively extended to 311,570 parcels, in the City of Calgary.

Rationalization: “From a city wide standpoint, there is nothing unusual about that”.

Chan openly stated that it’s within Councils jurisdiction and authority to make decisions citing the ‘housing crisis’, increase of housing and rental prices where the plaintiffs want property rights and Chan believes that these need to be balanced against…wait for it…’the public interests’.

Where the public showed up in masses as in 736 of them, with over 6000 presentations…the majority which were NOT in favor of blanket rezoning.

Chan tries to make the case that the city represents the Public Interests, more than the public represents themselves in their own Public Interests.

He’d noted that these same decisions have been made and implemented in Edmonton, Vancouver, Victoria and Kelowna…and sure, not everybody is in favor of this…but so what?

And then finally adds in that this decision was made by ‘democracy’ - voted in favor by a majority of City Councilors.

Where there are serious issues with this point alone.

Let’s start off with this…Blanket Rezoning was brought forward by Non-Elected Officials - the Planning and Development Department…meaning that they will not be forced to face the electorate at any time due to initiating a program that impacts the largest investments that a lot of Calgarians will have ever made.

Zero of the city councilors, including Mayor Gondek, ran on a platform of densification based on blanket rezoning…if they had, would they have been elected in their previous runs?

Lastly…the public hearing on Blanket Rezoning, while was amazing to see a lot of Calgarians coming forward and making their case against this new bylaw…if this were in fact a democratic process, was completely unnecessary.

Reason being…if city council wanted true democracy on changing 300k parcels of land:

That would impact the density of their neighborhoods;

Potentially impacting the value of their investment;

Creating issues with their yards being eclipsed by a new neighboring tower;

Congested Traffic;

Reduction of available parking;

Existing schools being over-populated;

Strained infrastructure - namely water, where Calgarians spent the last 2 summers under some form of water restrictions;

It would have been put to a plebiscite…which is what the plaintiffs are shooting for…not for citizens to have to individually make their cases against, which could be easily ignored by those on council who may have been biases or biased by presentations of those - including students and student council representatives - who don’t actually own property but support ideas proposed by way of affordable housing, nor by building developers who will prosper through building multiplexes in areas where they may case issue.

I’d seriously doubt after the amount of contention raised by this issue…that any candidate running for Calgary City Council, in the 2025 municipal election would actually add this to their list of priorities.

But if they wanted to…believing that they actually spoke to a majority of their constituents…go ahead!

Each councilor is responsible for several communities, in their wards…and if any of these communities got their neighbors together in favor of densification by way of what’s proposed…they could make this decision for their own individual and specific neighborhood - not the entirety of all neighborhoods and certainly not as the voice of all.