CALGARY — The epicentre of Canada’s energy industry is being heralded as the top ecological city in the world by a prestigious international think-tank.
The Mercer Quality of Living Survey ranked Calgary No. 28 on its overall quality-of-living list, but gave the city top spot in a new ecology ranking.
Calgary, home to the vast majority of Canada’s head offices for the oil and gas sector, narrowly edged out Honolulu and Ottawa for first place out of 320 cities considered in the evaluation. The “eco-city” ranking includes criteria such as water availability, water potability, waste removal, sewage, air pollution and traffic congestion.
The latter two would probably come as a surprise to many Calgary motorists who battle daily bumper-to-bumper traffic snarls and see the brown haze of pollution, which hangs over the city’s main north and south highway.
“In one way it’s confirmation of what we suspected, but given the breadth of the survey and the number of cities being included, we’ve done surprisingly well,” said Ald. Bob Hawkesworth. “I know that as we’ve been implementing new initiatives we know we’ve been leading the pack in many ways.”
Hawkesworth said Calgary has received a bad rap internationally, largely because of its economic reliance on the oil and gas industry, which is one of its major employers and a chief source of the city’s vaunted economic prosperity.
“We can’t allow ourselves to be painted into a corner of being the bad guys on the environment because people in the oilpatch, people in local government, people all across the province are concerned about the environment as much as anyone else in the world.”
However, Calgary isn’t quite as lily white environmentally as the survey would suggest, said Byron Miller, a University of Calgary geography professor, who specializes in urban planning and sprawl.
“Frankly the Mercer eco-city ranking strikes me as being quite odd in terms of what they’re measuring,” Miller said. “The ranking looks at six things. When you focus on those six things it’s not surprising that Calgary would come out pretty high.
“Water availability is not an issue here. We have very good quality water. Sewage treatment is a non-issue. We produce plenty of air pollution, but it all blows east so we don’t suffer from it because we’re on the plains and the wind takes it out. Traffic congestion — even though we complain about it — it’s not as bad as most other cities of our size.”
Miller is puzzled why things such as per capita energy use would not be considered or the problem of urban sprawl. Calgary ranks far worse than much larger cities such as New York on that front.
“Look at measures such as eco-footprint measures — we don’t do nearly as well. There was a study done in 2005 comparing the eco-footprints of a number of Canadian cities and we came out the worst,” he said.
Calgary’s director of environmental and safety management, David Day, said the city has always done well with water quality and acknowledges the criteria used by Mercer are pretty specific.
“The work we’re doing in terms of water treatment, water conservation and the quality of the water — those are the kind of leading indicators that Mercer is interested in its quality of life ratings,” noted Day.