Alberta Called, People Came, and Now Cities Are Stuck Carrying the Costs

In 2024, Premier Danielle Smith took to the Shaun Newman Podcast to argue Alberta needed to “aggressively” increase its population to fight Ottawa. Alberta should double to 10 million from 5 million, Smith said, to “actually have the political clout in Alberta that we deserve.”

• Alberta’s cities have grown, but provincial investment in municipal infrastructure hasn’t
• Danielle Smith’s government is ramping up use of municipal taxes to pay provincial bills
• Concerns are being raised over how Alberta’s electoral map will be redrawn amid the growth

Programs to entice people were already underway. The Alberta is Calling campaign, started under Jason Kenney in 2022 but continued under Smith, marketed Alberta as a retreat from expensive Canada. If you live in Toronto, Hamilton, or Vancouver, you likely remember the tag line: “Bigger paycheques. Smaller rent cheques.”

Alberta welcomed more than 200,000 people in 2023, and nearly 700,000 moved to the province between 2021 and 2025. Nearly all of these newcomers settled in cities, where eight in ten Albertans live. But provincial investment into city and municipal infrastructure continues to move in the opposite direction. Adjusted for inflation, municipalities have watched government money halved, from $635 per person in 2009 to $327 in 2023. When population increases, the provincial government sees its revenues climb through income taxes, but municipalities experience the opposite—more demand, but insufficient or delayed help, all while inflation only grows. The net result is that many municipal councils have been repeatedly forced to increase property taxes since at least 2019 to maintain basic infrastructure, such as water, roads, and fire halls.

This February, before the United Conservative Party released its 2026 budget—that included a deeply unpopular $9.4 billion deficit to pay for growth yet avoid new taxes—Smith took to the airwaves again for a special announcement. Absent was her earlier call for Alberta to grow aggressively, replaced by grievances. Ottawa had thrown “the doors open to anyone and everyone across the globe,” Smith said, and they had come to Alberta.

She then announced a referendum, in October, that will ask Albertans nine questions about immigration, access to government services for non-permanent residents, and the province’s relationship with Canada. “The fact is, Alberta taxpayers can no longer be asked to continue to subsidize the entire country through equalization and federal transfers, permit the federal government to flood our borders with new arrivals and then give free access to our most-generous-in-the-country social programs to anyone who moves here.”

But Smith’s fingerprints are all over the current financial strain facing the province. And it’s Alberta’s mayors and councils that are left to carry it.

Last fall, Dylan Bressey called every city, town, and village he could find. Bressey, a councillor in Grande Prairie and the president of Alberta Municipalities, wanted to understand how local governments were managing what he calls the “double whammy”—unprecedented population growth compounded by the provincial government’s continued retreat from funding municipalities. The answer was uniformly about struggle. He says he was shocked that 80 percent or so “named a really specific water or wastewater project that they didn’t know how they were going to fund this term, but they saw their community as desperately needing.”

In Edmonton, newly elected mayor Andrew Knack keeps a spreadsheet to track property tax increases in twenty-five municipalities. He says the average increase since 2019 is 25 percent. That’s no coincidence, he suggests, but a product of a broken funding system. “We have become the proxy [tax collector],” he says. “It can be frustrating when we hear the suggestion that municipalities just shouldn’t raise property taxes. Well, then which library or fire hall or police station do we not build?”

The whammy has a third dimension, though. Under Smith’s government, which owes its majority to rural and exurban voters, “city” is often used as an epithet, and its leaders framed as an ideological opposition. Cities have been stripped of tools to generate revenue, like photo radar that tickets speeding drivers, and watched provincial ministers meddle with their infrastructure projects. In late 2025, Smith sent a mandate letter to Minister of Municipal Affairs Dan Williams, directing him to place caps on municipal property taxes, target special municipal levies (Canmore had created a vacancy tax on properties), and review how much municipal officials are paid.

Any municipality that veered out of its lane to do “woke politics,” like plastic straw bans or diversity, equity, and inclusion policies, Williams said, would result in the provincial government putting them “on track.”

The rhetorical aggression toward urban municipalities plays well with the UCP’s base. But it overlooks the fact that the Smith government is ramping up its own use of municipal property taxes to pay provincial bills. The UCP plans to pay one-third of the tab for schools through the education requisition—a mandated addition to municipal taxes, growing from $2.5 billion in 2023 to $3.6 billion in 2028.

Cities have fired back. Calgary’s newly elected mayor, Jeromy Farkas, has called for a plebiscite to ask if the city gets a “fair deal.” Calgary’s water infrastructure has become so strained—in part, from years of boom-town growth compounded by years of provincial under-investment—that the city has had to order residents to restrict water four times since 2023. Meanwhile, as Farkas has pointed out, the provincially mandated increase to property taxes in Calgary is the main reason why city taxes are going up.

The hypocrisy held until Smith’s own responsibilities started to crack. In late 2025, Edmonton’s emergency rooms became so crowded that people died while waiting to see a doctor. Provincial schools now have more students—and more students with complex needs—than ever, with officials sounding alarms. Smith’s ability to pay for infrastructure and services has been limited by her ability to propose them. Increased provincial taxes are nearly a political non-starter; the lack of a sales tax remains coded into Albertan political identity. The province derives one-third of its revenue from taxing oil and gas production, which broke records in 2025. But when oil prices softened in late 2025, leaving a budgetary hole, Smith had few palatable options left.

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Whether Smith accepts calling for the growth or not, nearly 700,000 new residents mean Alberta’s electoral map has to be redrawn to ensure effective representation. And yet again, thanks to the UCP’s favouritism toward the rural and exurban voters that it owes its majority to, cities appear poised to lose.

The Alberta Electoral Boundaries Commission was charged with proposing where to create new districts. The independent commission delivered its report in March, supported by three of the five members, suggesting that new city ridings be added to Calgary and Edmonton, while some existing rural ridings, which were losing population, be consolidated or removed. But then two UCP-linked commissioners issued a competing minority report that undermined the entire process. They proposed fourteen urban–rural hybrid ridings, slicing city ridings up like a pie and combining them with surrounding rural regions that were losing residents. End result: rural voters, who overwhelmingly support Smith, would be added to city ridings where voters are far less likely to be in her court.

Then things truly got interesting. The minority report reeked of gerrymandering to opposition New Democratic Party leader Naheed Nenshi. He accused Smith of pushing for the minority report, which clearly favours the UCP. Smith denied it. And then her government broke generations of Alberta precedent by scrapping the independent commission’s work entirely.

How will Alberta redraw its electoral map for its next election in 2027 then? Smith has created a special committee with three government members of the Legislative Assembly and two from the opposition NDP—all with a conflicted interest in the outcome—to oversee a panel that will decide where the boundaries will go.

It’s something of a trend. In 2025, Ontario held its first election in decades that didn’t see its ridings harmonized with federal ones, in order to preserve more rural representation in Northern Ontario. In May, the Supreme Court of Canada struck down Quebec’s recent attempt to suspend its own independent electoral boundaries commission’s work as unconstitutional.

Smith talked of growing Alberta to earn the political clout it deserves. But she appears intent on stripping clout, provincially speaking, from where people actually live in Alberta. It’s easy, then, to contemplate a future where Alberta’s double whammy is made permanent. It’s a future where the province’s once symbiotic relationship with its cities and municipalities continues to devolve toward simple financial and political extraction and where these cities continue to fill with people who need infrastructure and services but also continue losing power and wealth.