The New Ontario: Corridor Of Power
IN THE 1800s aboriginals called it the Wolf ’s Track, and you’d have been hard-pressed to find anyone on it. Today the Edmonton-Calgary corridor is one of the fastest-growing regions in the world and boasts a population of nearly 2.5 million souls, more than Manitoba and Saskatchewan combined. Every day 50,000 vehicles use the four-lane divided thoroughfare known as Highway 2. Once flanked by vast prairie expanses that on a clear day still offer scenic glimpses of the Rocky Mountains, the corridor now sports jarring colonies of constant residential development and classic nowhere architecture.
Dubbed the “Western Tiger” by the TD Bank Financial Group, the corridor connects Edmonton, a sprawling metropolis serving the oil sands, to Calgary, a sprawling metropolis answering the continent’s insatiable appetite for natural gas. In between lie more growing concerns such as Red Deer, an agriculture and oilpatch centre dominated by evangelical churches that serves as a trading area for nearly two million people. A land of new subdivisions, sleek SUVs and cellphone-armed engineers and dealmakers, the region’s commercial heart — try $105 billion in related investments — furiously outpaces southern Ontario’s. Its standard of living is actually closer to that of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, the wealthiest nation on earth.
It has also developed growing pains. Manure from factory farms around Red Deer threatens local groundwater as well as the sanity of down-winders. Subdivisions are sprawling so quickly over the prairie that oil and gas drillers collide daily with municipal planners and housing developers. So many new cottages have been planned for Sylvan Lake, a poor man’s Muskoka, that the water body won’t be able to handle its projected flotilla of 400 boats. The oilpatch now plans to drill more than 50,000 coal bed methane wells on prime corridor farmland; the region could theoretically end up supporting 12 times that number. In Calgary, concentric rings of monster-sized homes continue to creep toward the foothills so determinedly that the scenic drive to Banff may soon be obliterated. A recent proposal to drill sour-gas wells on the edge of the city immediately placed 250,000 citizens in an “emergency planning zone,” a controversial designation usually found around nuclear power plants.
According to Calgary’s smiling Mayor Dave Bronconnier, whom everyone calls Bronco, “there is no such thing as urban sprawl in Calgary.” The numbers, however, show a city with a vastly expanding waistline. Since 1970 the population has more than doubled. A road network of 2,800 kilometres has become a clogged maze of 12,000. In terms of square kilometres, Calgary now has the same size footprint as New York — but with only one-tenth of the people. “Calgary is a centrifugal force spinning out,” says Bev Sandalack, a local urban designer. In this unrestrained spin, farmland and mountain vistas are disappearing. “It’s unsustainable and unethical” to Sandalack, but in this place, with no immediate natural constraints — such as a great lake — to force greater population density, the end of suburbia is nowhere in sight.
IN THE 1800s aboriginals called it the Wolf ’s Track, and you’d have been hard-pressed to find anyone on it. Today the Edmonton-Calgary corridor is one of the fastest-growing regions in the world and boasts a population of nearly 2.5 million souls, more than Manitoba and Saskatchewan combined. Every day 50,000 vehicles use the four-lane divided thoroughfare known as Highway 2. Once flanked by vast prairie expanses that on a clear day still offer scenic glimpses of the Rocky Mountains, the corridor now sports jarring colonies of constant residential development and classic nowhere architecture.
Dubbed the “Western Tiger” by the TD Bank Financial Group, the corridor connects Edmonton, a sprawling metropolis serving the oil sands, to Calgary, a sprawling metropolis answering the continent’s insatiable appetite for natural gas. In between lie more growing concerns such as Red Deer, an agriculture and oilpatch centre dominated by evangelical churches that serves as a trading area for nearly two million people. A land of new subdivisions, sleek SUVs and cellphone-armed engineers and dealmakers, the region’s commercial heart — try $105 billion in related investments — furiously outpaces southern Ontario’s. Its standard of living is actually closer to that of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, the wealthiest nation on earth.
It has also developed growing pains. Manure from factory farms around Red Deer threatens local groundwater as well as the sanity of down-winders. Subdivisions are sprawling so quickly over the prairie that oil and gas drillers collide daily with municipal planners and housing developers. So many new cottages have been planned for Sylvan Lake, a poor man’s Muskoka, that the water body won’t be able to handle its projected flotilla of 400 boats. The oilpatch now plans to drill more than 50,000 coal bed methane wells on prime corridor farmland; the region could theoretically end up supporting 12 times that number. In Calgary, concentric rings of monster-sized homes continue to creep toward the foothills so determinedly that the scenic drive to Banff may soon be obliterated. A recent proposal to drill sour-gas wells on the edge of the city immediately placed 250,000 citizens in an “emergency planning zone,” a controversial designation usually found around nuclear power plants.
According to Calgary’s smiling Mayor Dave Bronconnier, whom everyone calls Bronco, “there is no such thing as urban sprawl in Calgary.” The numbers, however, show a city with a vastly expanding waistline. Since 1970 the population has more than doubled. A road network of 2,800 kilometres has become a clogged maze of 12,000. In terms of square kilometres, Calgary now has the same size footprint as New York — but with only one-tenth of the people. “Calgary is a centrifugal force spinning out,” says Bev Sandalack, a local urban designer. In this unrestrained spin, farmland and mountain vistas are disappearing. “It’s unsustainable and unethical” to Sandalack, but in this place, with no immediate natural constraints — such as a great lake — to force greater population density, the end of suburbia is nowhere in sight.
