Calgary has been having water problems lately. In June 2024, the city’s largest water line, the main feeder from the Bearspaw reservoir, broke, triggering severe water restrictions for the next two weeks.
Calgarians entered 2026 with another break of the feeder, again throwing the city into severe water restrictions and boil water advisories. As I write (January 17th), the repairs are finally complete—no more flush only when necessary, do only full loads of laundry/dishes and take short showers. At least until the next time.
The latest break coincided with the release of a report from the expert panel The City had appointed to study the 2024 break. It was not pleasant reading. According to the panel, “The city prioritized other critical needs and initiatives, repeatedly deferring [the pipe’s] inspection, monitoring and risk mitigation.” The Sprawl, an aptly named Calgary newsletter, summed up the report tersely as “Knowledge was fragmented. Responsibility was murky. And the pressures of growth eclipsed all else.”
The panel made a number of recommendations and Mayor Jeromy Farkas has said city hall needs to act on all of them. “We cannot cherry pick” he said, and The City will “spare no expense” in replacing the line.
This is good to hear, but there is an underlying issue that, while not directly connected to the Bearspaw South Feeder Main, very much affects the cost of maintaining facilities.
On page 19 of the panel’s report, we read “Calgary’s situation is particularly acute … it remains a low-density municipality, resulting in more kilometres of pipe per resident than any other large Canadian peer city.” The authors are talking about sprawl.
It illustrates the point with some intriguing, and rather startling, statistics. The average length of water treatment and supply pipe for each Calgary user is 4.2 metres. It is nearly the same for our sister city of Edmonton, at 4.0 metres, but for Montreal it is only 2.7 metres, Toronto even less at 1.7 metres, and for Vancouver the bargain basement of only 0.6 metres per resident.
In other words, every Calgarian has to pay for the maintenance of seven times as much water pipe as the average Vancouverite. And Vancouver doesn’t have the brutal freezing and thawing that we Calgarians do. That’s the cost of sprawl. Perhaps it has created a water system that we can hardly afford.
And that’s just for water. The extra cost applies as well to sewer systems, roads, sidewalks, snow removal, etc. The Center for Biological Diversity estimated that sprawl increased the per capita infrastructure costs on average for U.S. cities by 50 percent.
And sprawl does more harm than just increasing infrastructure costs. It results in more habitat destruction and loss of farmland. It increases car dependency which in turn increases emissions that worsen public health and contribute to global warming.
A compact city is more efficient environmentally as well as financially, and as an added bonus it is more vibrant—people love to be around people.
In 2024, Calgary made a major move toward greater density by approving a plan for citywide rezoning which allowed more housing types (townhomes, duplexes) to be built in zones previously restricted to single family homes. The plan was primarily designed to increase housing availability and seemed to be doing the job. However, it was highly controversial and a new Council, elected in 2025, is repealing it. My councillor, Nathaniel Schmidt (Ward 8), was, I’m pleased to say, one of only two members of City Council who voted against repeal.
As Council debates the water problem, they should tie their deliberations into the housing/zoning problem. The two are clearly not separate issues. We need a more compact city to ensure housing affordability, but we also need a more compact city to ensure that a high quality, properly maintained water system is affordable. Sprawl is the enemy of both.