What I like about Calgary is it's almost a microcosm of every place, every constituency that's represented here. I've looked at where everybody is from. I was in the military for 20 years and I've lived all across Canada, so I've lived close to or in most of the locations where everybody is from. Calgary is totally different from the point of view that the....
In 1962 I went to a national youth conference, training for the summer. I had to do a talk about Calgary and why Calgary was unique. Everybody knows about the zoo, the Calgary Stampede, and the mountains, but nobody realizes that in Calgary, when I was growing up, there were four trees. Each tree became a park. Calgary is in the middle of the prairies, and there are no trees naturally around Calgary, except for scrub trees. Calgary is now very well treed, but every tree has been planted by somebody in the last hundred years.
It really bothers me, then, that people have the ability to chop down trees. Calgary, when I grew up, had a population of just over 100,000. Now it's well over a million, so there is no common culture in the way most of you would have a common culture in your area. Our culture is not predominantly redneck; it's a mélange. It's a grouping of everybody from everywhere. That's part of the problem.
People come in and they feel they can chop down trees, and they don't realize that the tree they've taken down took 80 to 100 years to grow and that the tree they plant won't be the same size for another hundred years. The reason for that is the chinooks, and I think everybody knows about the chinooks. They change the weather so precipitately in Calgary that trees are fooled into thinking it's spring and they start to grow. Then the weather goes back to 30 below the next day and kills off the trees.
There are a number of things I did, but the big one, which I talked to Michelle about, was this. Right in the area where I live, there are gardens. I assume they were originally community gardens. They were started in the early 1900s in Calgary. For the people who lived in Calgary to get vegetables, they had to buy them from the CPR, the Canadian Pacific Railway. The main reason for Calgary's location was that the railway went through it. Vegetables were very pricey. They were hard to come by and usually they weren't very good quality.
In 1912 a lady named Annie Gale, who went on to become one of the first female aldermen in the British Commonwealth, got together and decided.... Calgary was boom and bust all the time. There was a big bust in 1912. The economy cratered. There were all these lots in the city, so she said, “Why not turn these into vegetable gardens and allow the people who live there to grow vegetables? That will help them out. It will be a win-win situation. It will beautify the land for the city and keep it that way.”
That happened in 1912. The particular piece of land I was looking at could be traced back to the 1920s. We could trace it back as a garden since the 1920s, because the fellow who was in there gardening had moved there at the age of 10 and was still gardening there, and 80 years later—he's 90 now—he's still out in that garden gardening.
One day the city authorities came and posted that there was to be no more garden. It was going to be a condominium development. That bothered me. I took it on as a personal challenge. It took a year and a half, but we got it declared a heritage site and subsequently got it turned into a city park, so that will be there forever.
It's an absolutely beautiful area. It's a 10-minute walk from the centre of Calgary. Part of what we did when it became a city park was to put up benches. People come and sit and look at the garden. People are enthralled by it.
This is another neat statistic. I talked about the diversity of Calgary. When you go into the garden, you get a real picture of what Calgary is like. There are people from everywhere. The only person actually born in Calgary is Marsh Libids, who is the fellow who moved there in the 1930s. Everybody else is from England, Holland, Afghanistan, or Vietnam. I'm thinking about who else is around the table. There are 12 gardeners in there. Everybody except for Marsh is from someplace else.
It's a very neat location. It's a very interesting way to get people together and to mix with and meet other people.
There's a huge demand for people to get into the garden. Unfortunately, the garden has to be kept as a historic site. They have to show it the way it always was, so we can't take a lot of people in there; otherwise, it would be just little small community garden plots. I'm pushing to get some more land now to make community gardens.
In that neighbourhood, part of our problem is that the city has decided they want to densify to get more people into that neighbourhood. They took over all the recreational land for the community centre and they've turned it into sites for high-rises to be built to bring more people into that area.
This is where I start thinking of your involvement. They don't have the vision and the realization that by bringing in lots of people, they're taking away all the recreational land. There is nothing for young people to do in that neighbourhood. I think that might tie in with what Dr. Reeves is going to talk about in a little while. We've got all these young people with nothing to do. Well, they find things to do.
I also protect the natural growth prairie area, which seems to have a fire once or twice a year. I know at least a couple of them have been caused by young people, but a couple have also been caused by homeless people who wander through that neighbourhood because it's so close to downtown.
There are many issues there, but to sum up, what I would look for and what I would see the role of the federal government to be would be to supply some sort of overriding vision for what green space in the city should be and how it should be used.
I think many of the problems we have come from the nearsightedness of city planners who don't see beyond an immediate problem they have to solve, as well as the constant changing of aldermen every three years, who also don't really have a take on what's going on. They make decisions that often are developer-driven. For some reason, if a developer sees green space in the middle of the city, they can think of a thousand things they can do there. That causes many problems when trying to preserve stuff.