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Alberta (Re)Bound · CityTalk Canada

• 0:07
  Mary Rowe: This is City Talk the podcast brought to you by the Canadian Urban Institute, or CUI.
• 0:12
  Mary Rowe: I'm Mary Rowe.
• 0:13
  Mary Rowe: This is a particularly unique week in Canada.
• 0:17
  Mary Rowe: We have had a dramatic election return in the West.
• 0:20
  Mary Rowe: And if you've been listening to this program and following Canada's urban development in recent years, you're likely aware that the city of Edmonton, Alberta's second largest city, is among the most progressive in the land on many fronts, certainly the most effective on addressing housing, density, climate resilience, and other leading issues.
• 0:37
  Mary Rowe: Many of these accomplishments got their start under the mayoral tenure of my guest today on Citytalk.
• 0:44
  Mary Rowe: These days, Don Iveson lends his former mayor expertise in municipal affairs to a variety of initiatives, and he remains, yes, he remains, a vocal supporter of his city's progressive future.
• 0:56
  Mary Rowe: Lately, however, he's been taking issue with some of the actions of the current provincial government.
• 1:02
  Mary Rowe: I invited him to the City Talk studio late last week, prior to the referendum, for an overdue chat about some of his favorite topics.
• 1:11
  Don Iveson: Well, thanks, Mary.
• 1:12
  Don Iveson: It's always uh a privilege to connect with you and with the CUI audience.
• 1:17
  Don Iveson: And uh I should be clear that to the greatest extent possible, and it is hard to separate these things, I realize I'm I'm speaking to you as former mayor of Edmonton, resident of Edmonton, uh Alberton, uh, and not on behalf of any organizations I've uh previously worked with or currently uh associate with.
• 1:37
  Don Iveson: So that's uh that's a fine needle to thread uh uh given some of the things I do in the housing space, but uh these views are my own to be crystal clear.
• 1:47
  Don Iveson: These days I work at the intersection of the climate crisis and the housing crisis.
• 1:51
  Don Iveson: Uh the work I do with insurers is about affordability, buildability, land use, design, resilience, efficiency, financing, and insurance.
• 2:03
  Don Iveson: And so it's maybe not an intersection, maybe it's a loop uh that I'm trying to close.
• 2:08
  Don Iveson: You know, there are lots of solutions for housing, some of which are good for climate and some of which are bad.
• 2:14
  Don Iveson: Uh, there are lots of solutions for climate, some of which are good for housing, some of which are bad from a housing perspective.
• 2:21
  Don Iveson: But it begins to emerge when you sort of like two layers of polarized glass, whatever you can see through the double constraint of don't make the climate challenge worse for people, whether it's their pocketbooks on energy efficiency, or whether it's car dependency, uh, or whether it's building in a floodplain where you're going to lose the asset, but also don't make the affordability crisis worth, don't imperil supply, don't, don't stall uh the ability to deliver housing.
• 2:50
  Don Iveson: When you look through both of those pieces of polarized class, they are clarifying, not polarizing.
• 2:55
  Don Iveson: And so that's why the top, and I'm coming back to where we started, the the the top recommendation from that task force was legalize density.
• 3:04
  Don Iveson: Legalize density.
• 3:07
  Don Iveson: And unfortunately, last week the government of Alberta sent a pretty strong signal that it wants to make at least certain forms of density that it doesn't really know a lot about or understand and doesn't have the technical depth in because it's not their jurisdiction.
• 3:21
  Don Iveson: I mean, legally, constitutionally, they can take back authority over land use.
• 3:26
  Don Iveson: But as Mayor Knack said, the government may not know what it's doing.
• 3:31
  Don Iveson: It lacks the technical knowledge and expertise to understand even just the chaos that's been created in the boring business of permits, not just for multiplex housing in Edmonton, but for anybody who depends on the zoning bylaw, which is anybody, you know, by introducing things like parking requirements uh into the mix, which the city of Edmonton um isn't the only city and country, but was one of the first to considerably deregulate parking requirements, partly to reduce car dependency, but also just to cut red tape.
• 4:07
  Don Iveson: Eliminating parking requirements was as much around businesses in our old streetcar districts that couldn't get uh a development permit to expand a restaurant because it needed 27 more parking permits, which made sense out in the suburbs that you would have to have that many more parking permits in a power center or parking spaces in a power center.
• 4:28
  Don Iveson: But on White Avenue or 124th Street or in the Highlands, where everybody's gonna walk to that business and there's already ample street parking, taking the zoning bylaw back to the 1960s with respect to parking requirements, that that is what the premier announced their intention is.
• 4:43
  Don Iveson: Even though the city hasn't seen anything in writing about this yet, and and and isn't going to for another three weeks, so this didn't just arrest contentious a-plex development, which we can talk about why there's been pushback on that.
• 4:57
  Don Iveson: So, anyway, I will pause there and take a deep breath and then ask you where you want to go next on this conversation.
• 5:03
  Mary Rowe: As I say, you know, City Talk is about talking, and you're a good talker, so thanks for joining us on this.
• 5:08
  Mary Rowe: Um, and what we always used to say when we did City Talks live, which we may still go back to doing, but now we do them in this format so that people have an opportunity to really, you know, expand on an idea.
• 5:18
  Mary Rowe: And then people react, and you know, we hear from people who've listened.
• 5:21
  Mary Rowe: And so it always the beginning of a conversation that's really never-ending.
• 5:25
  Mary Rowe: I appreciate that.
• 5:26
  Mary Rowe: And when you said the dual crisis kind of being a confluence, it's also a Guardian knot.
• 5:32
  Mary Rowe: Like we are in the midst of, as you suggested, probably more than two crises.
• 5:36
  Mary Rowe: You said climate and housing, but we've also got all sorts of other things, including the big E-word, the economic crisis that communities are feeling at the hyperlocal level.
• 5:45
  Mary Rowe: You know, when we run Main Street Canada, we hear from businesses on the ground what the implications are of uncertainty and the tariff.
• 5:53
  Mary Rowe: And as we see more constraints uh being put into the housing sector, I'm sure you and your colleagues on the climate side are anxious that the things that will get removed that are seen as nice to have or too expensive will be lifted off and we'll be going into build, baby, build and and and not necessarily building the right way, building with the best materials, getting the best climate benefits that we need to maybe we are the run the risk of building ugly.
• 6:23
  Mary Rowe: Just saying.
• 6:24
  Don Iveson: Well, yes, some of this is aesthetic and regulating aesthetics is has always been challenging.
• 6:30
  Don Iveson: Um, but I think it's going to be one of the things that has to get looked at here in Edmonton as part of whatever happens to the zoning bylaw going from here.
• 6:39
  Don Iveson: But I want to circle back to what you were saying a minute ago about the economic crisis, because you're right.
• 6:43
  Don Iveson: I mean, the reason it's so hard to solve for housing is because of the economic headwinds.
• 6:49
  Don Iveson: And part of the reasons it's so hard to solve for climate is because of the affordability headwinds.
• 6:55
  Don Iveson: Um, but just to just to put a finer point on what it was saying earlier, if you're that small business on White Avenue who is looking to expand right now, the government of Alberta has just introduced the kind of permitting and regulatory uncertainty that they complain about other orders of government imposing on Alberta and its industries.
• 7:15
  Don Iveson: And so I do need to just pause to say that when a government does that, as the government of Alberta has pointed out correctly from time to time, it really is unfavorable for investors at all scales, whether it's the home builder in Edmonton who doesn't know what to do with the piece of land that they bought and have a development permit but not a building permit yet, or the small business that's looking to expand.
• 7:40
  Don Iveson: So introducing more regulatory curveballs in a fragile economy, to say nothing of the regulatory curveball of separation.
• 7:49
  Don Iveson: We're you know four days away from the referendum here, which I think is gonna be okay.
• 7:54
  Don Iveson: So let's not dwell on that.
• 7:55
  Don Iveson: But you know, just for a minute, consider the timing.
• 7:58
  Don Iveson: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 8:00
  Mary Rowe: It adds to the volatility of it, and also just the politics of it.
• 8:03
  Don Iveson: It's not helping us build a stronger economy.
• 8:05
  Don Iveson: It's not helping us boost investor confidence.
• 8:08
  Don Iveson: But so that's the economic headwinds that we're all dealing with.
• 8:12
  Don Iveson: Um, and I think some of the trade-offs in housing and climate are financing issues.
• 8:16
  Don Iveson: They're their total cost of ownership versus sticker cost, right?
• 8:20
  Don Iveson: Like we know that a better insulated house with a heat pump, as long as electricity stays somewhat affordable, is probably gonna be cheaper to operate, uh, even if it's a little bit more expensive to buy.
• 8:30
  Don Iveson: And if you're a purpose-built rental builder, you're already doing that.
• 8:34
  Don Iveson: You're thinking like an asset owner.
• 8:35
  Don Iveson: You're and you're because you're thinking about the pension fund or the REIT you're gonna sell this building to, or you're building it to hold in your own portfolio.
• 8:43
  Don Iveson: So as opposed to condos where the incentive was all about um build it, flip it, and transfer the risk to future special assessment um strata fee or condo fee payers.
• 8:54
  Don Iveson: And so you had very, very bad buildings that rapidly start to deteriorate.
• 8:58
  Don Iveson: Purpose-built rental is uh think like an owner, um, uh asset management.
• 9:04
  Don Iveson: And um, we need to figure out how to get what's self-evidently good discipline, which is a more efficient boiler, uh, better windows, um, not vinyl siding because hail might shred it or heat might melt it.
• 9:18
  Don Iveson: And so that's life cycle thinking, total cost of ownership thinking.
• 9:22
  Don Iveson: There's a big gap in single family homes and and small and the missing middle still in getting that discipline.
• 9:30
  Don Iveson: It's a gap in our financing system that I think a lot about.
• 9:33
  Don Iveson: But but setting that those issues aside, I want to come back to the other crisis that that that uh you you you uh name checked, which is affordability.
• 9:44
  Don Iveson: Yeah, so the affordability crisis um also collides with this development in not just in Edmonton, by the way.
• 9:54
  Don Iveson: If you listen to the mayor of Calgary, the head of municipalities Alberta, and the head of the rural municipalities of Alberta, the government of Alberta has created, I think, a quasi-constitutional crisis with its municipalities, uh, because they have created uncertainty about their ability to do their jobs according to the Municipal Government Act and the way case law is evolved to require them to do land use using uh hearings and a process that is quasi-judicial.
• 10:27
  Don Iveson: But procedurally, as a matter of natural law and administrative fairness, the government of Alberta has asked its elected officials who, under its own legislation, are charged to be agents of fairness.
• 10:40
  Don Iveson: It has told them to prejudge an outcome.
• 10:43
  Don Iveson: And that's crazy making for these elected officials.
• 10:46
  Don Iveson: Just listen to them.
• 10:47
  Don Iveson: I mean, they've calmed down a bit, and I've calmed down a bit from last week, but I know exactly what they're feeling, and I'm incensed on their behalf.
• 10:56
  Don Iveson: So, sorry, that's not the affordability issue.
• 10:59
  Don Iveson: That's the constitutional, quasi-constitutional cluster blank unleashed here.
• 11:06
  Mary Rowe: Yeah, let me step in on that because um I appreciate that the housing is a particular uh demonstration of what you and I would argue would probably be another crisis, which is around governance.
• 11:19
  Don Iveson: Governance and interjurisdictional alignment, absolutely.
• 11:23
  Mary Rowe: And we're seeing that in the country in an in an extraordinarily vivid way in a whole bunch of examples, whether it's Churchill Falls or whether it's housing policy in Alberta or whether it's the waterfront redevelopment uh and airport expansions in Ontario, like that we see this repeatedly.
• 11:38
  Mary Rowe: And you and I have been in this conversation for a few years because we both have gray hair.
• 11:42
  Mary Rowe: The the way in which Canada is organized with the orders of government that we have, and you and I always religiously want to call them orders, not levels.
• 11:49
  Mary Rowe: We want to somehow eliminate this hierarchy.
• 11:52
  Mary Rowe: I feel like it's become kind of a trope that we say, well, municipal governments are just creatures of their province.
• 11:57
  Mary Rowe: And I've stopped being, I don't care anymore, you know.
• 12:01
  Mary Rowe: I think people want to live in a place that works.
• 12:03
  Mary Rowe: And the dilemma that that you and I and others who are immersed in this space is that the governance arrangements make it very difficult to do place-based decision making, planning, policy enforcement.
• 12:19
  Mary Rowe: And I think that when you see situations where I would colloquially say that an other order of government, Bigfoots, into a local challenge, I think there are lots of reasons for that.
• 12:33
  Mary Rowe: It's not always some politically motivated thing.
• 12:37
  Mary Rowe: It could also be that, and I want you to respond to me in this, and we don't have to just talk about Alberta because it exists everywhere.
• 12:43
  Mary Rowe: I feel that this is the rub we're in, is that we need place-based policy, place-based leadership, as you're suggesting.
• 12:52
  Mary Rowe: Investors need certainty.
• 12:53
  Mary Rowe: And we don't seem to be great at figuring out what the right mechanisms are, and we end up defaulting back to, well, we just need constitutional change, and then half the world's eyes glaze over and they say, well, forget that.
• 13:04
  Mary Rowe: So as we are in this existential crisis economically with recon with recasting our relationship with the neighbor to the south, is there a moment where we can galvanize a better collaborative arrangement regionally, smaller regionally, and so that the provinces, whether it's British Columbia or or uh Newfoundland or Ontario, don't get inundated with constituent complaints and then feel compelled to step in.
• 13:33
  Mary Rowe: And, you know, I I find this frustrating from my point of view because as much as localists will say they want autonomy and they want uh self-determination, and yet if they're not able to uh build the consensus they need, they will, by default, go to Big Daddy and ask the province or the feds to intervene.
• 13:56
  Mary Rowe: And here we are in this sort of cycle of almost infantilism where where the powers of the senior, sorry to be on the rant here, um, where the seniors where this where where the senior, I'm putting this in air quotes, the senior orders of government um end up uh you know waltzing in and infuriating people.
• 14:20
  Mary Rowe: But at the same time, as a person watching, I'm thinking, yeah, but come on, local guys, get your acts together, deal with your constituents, forge the consensus you need locally and across the region so that there's no uh justifiable role for a province or a federal government for that matter to feel that they have to come in and save the day.
• 14:40
  Mary Rowe: And back we are.
• 14:42
  Mary Rowe: Oh, thank goodness daddy took care of us.
• 14:45
  Don Iveson: Well, there's a lot there.
• 14:48
  Don Iveson: Uh I think, I think, I think most of which I agree with.
• 14:52
  Don Iveson: Um maybe where where I would add a little color, and and you have an amazing perspective on this, having been at a provincial legislature in this in the constitutional sandwich between challenges of jurisdiction, which are fair fights to have between provinces and the federal government, most of which has been resolved because it was written down in law.
• 15:13
  Don Iveson: And right or wrong, it is what it is.
• 15:15
  Don Iveson: Right.
• 15:16
  Don Iveson: Municipal affairs is provincial.
• 15:19
  Don Iveson: I don't think anyone's suggesting it shouldn't be.
• 15:21
  Don Iveson: I'm certainly not.
• 15:22
  Don Iveson: But so far, the resolution is the court saying provinces can do this, provinces can do this.
• 15:28
  Don Iveson: And that has enabled provinces to do yet more intrusion into things that are best administered locally.
• 15:35
  Don Iveson: Um and all of these things offend what was a normative, not written down, but essentially quasi-constitutional premise, which governments in Alberta respected for across stripes, across generations, which was the idea of subsidiarity.
• 15:52
  Don Iveson: And essentially, even though no one ever wrote it down, home rule, or at least since modern municipal government acts came into place in Alberta.
• 16:01
  Don Iveson: And Alberta's was actually one of the first because progressive conservatives of the day respected the premise of subsidiarity and wanted to empower local institutions who are closer to the people and understand what they want.
• 16:13
  Don Iveson: But that somewhere in there, this idea of centralization of power at provincial legislatures, it's going to cause a lot of problems just in the context of land use and urban planning.
• 16:27
  Don Iveson: And I'll use this as a segue to get back to affordability, which is that if the direction effectively to Edmonton explicitly and to Calgary tacitly, and to all other municipalities in Alberta for that matter, is that your compact infrastructure-efficient, climate-smart, transportation alternative-enabling municipal development plans and strategies and zoning bylaws and rules, the whole cascade of things, but from the principle on down, the government of Alberta does not support.
• 17:02
  Don Iveson: And because here's the thing in Edmonton, um, over the last couple of years, since the city legalized density, and some people will argue that the city went too far too fast, and will say this is a reckoning for going too far too fast.
• 17:16
  Mary Rowe: Yeah, and I think this is something that is we're seeing in other environments as well.
• 17:20
  Mary Rowe: So if you look at the resistance in Vancouver to the way in which the downtown East side has evolved, again, there would be a critique, which I think you're alluding to here, that there are periods when councils may get out in front of their constituents, uh, or the staff get out in front of their constituents, and you and if you don't bring them along, you get these kinds of rear guard actions.
• 17:44
  Don Iveson: However, I will note that this issue was hotly contested in a municipal election that occurred less than 365 days ago.
• 17:52
  Don Iveson: And the mayor who won uh won defending the principle of density, and then also took a mandate back to say we're going to make some changes to the bylaw because there are some issues with the first round of fourplexes.
• 18:07
  Don Iveson: I mean, they call them eightplexes, but they're fourplexes with basement suites.
• 18:10
  Don Iveson: So it's eight units.
• 18:11
  Don Iveson: As I mentioned at the beginning, some of them are ugly.
• 18:13
  Don Iveson: So there's design issues to deal with, there's on-site parking issues to deal with if they're not close to better transit.
• 18:20
  Don Iveson: There's a lot of so they they maybe they needed to make some corrections.
• 18:25
  Don Iveson: However, the government of Alberta coming in and chilling the entire land use and permitting system and introducing this crisis and chaos, uh, I think was maybe an overreach and overreaction.
• 18:39
  Don Iveson: I really do want to get to affordability before we end here because it's actually to me what this is about.
• 18:44
  Don Iveson: But the the challenge um with with that overreach is is the unintended consequences uh uh across the board.
• 18:52
  Don Iveson: And and I I I I think it's undemocratic.
• 18:55
  Don Iveson: Um, because I think the council was getting there in making some changes.
• 19:00
  Mary Rowe: Well, let's let's just let's let's pick it up there.
• 19:01
  Mary Rowe: Let's pick it up there for a second because I think part of this is about, well, obviously timing is a big factor here, and there are all sorts of other political things that are going on.
• 19:09
  Mary Rowe: I I'm very interested in your observation, which I think isn't unique to you to your part of the country, that where people advocate to be treated in a certain way, and if they're not, then they do as I say, not as I do.
• 19:20
  Mary Rowe: No, then they can't, you know, they say, well, we're being screwed, so we're gonna kick the cat.
• 19:24
  Mary Rowe: Like we've all done this.
• 19:25
  Mary Rowe: And I think that that coming back to uh people, regular people have no idea really whose jurisdiction it is to do certain things.
• 19:33
  Mary Rowe: And whenever anything isn't working, they come screaming generally to their city counselor because they have access to them uh and they and they see them in the community and they can get to their offices.
• 19:42
  Mary Rowe: And so, you know, I feel we're in this.
• 19:44
  Mary Rowe: Uh I'm old enough to make this reference, Don.
• 19:46
  Mary Rowe: You perhaps aren't, but we're in this Peter Finch moment in network where he put his head out the window and told everybody, I'm mad as hell and I'm not gonna take it anymore.
• 19:54
  Mary Rowe: And you know, I don't know if you remember that movie.
• 19:56
  Don Iveson: Well, everyone's that mad about everything.
• 19:57
  Don Iveson: Everybody's that mad about everything and the end of the world, and yeah.
• 20:01
  Don Iveson: So we do need to all take a breath, myself included.
• 20:04
  Mary Rowe: Yeah.
• 20:04
  Mary Rowe: This comes at a cost, this kind of conflict to investor certainty.
• 20:09
  Don Iveson: Yeah.
• 20:09
  Don Iveson: Everybody, everybody's in the valley.
• 20:12
  Mary Rowe: Post-COVID, we seem to have lost our our collective empathy.
• 20:16
  Mary Rowe: You know, I I would like to think that the federal government and the provincial governments want municipal governments to do well, they want uh our ways of organizing our lives to work well for people so they can have jobs and create businesses and raise families and have fun, and that it's a great place to invest and a great place to live.
• 20:36
  Mary Rowe: And I hope that the uh Mandarins in Ottawa are listening to us because they don't often talk about on-the-ground stuff.
• 20:42
  Mary Rowe: And when we have a situation like this, where oh, the children are fighting again, it I think it just reinforces a kind of distance as opposed to we are in this together.
• 20:54
  Mary Rowe: We know that we need to have more units of housing in various places and in various unit configurations across this country.
• 21:01
  Mary Rowe: And let's work together to find ways to do that.
• 21:04
  Mary Rowe: And when you see these kinds of very dramatic gestures, no, you can't, or it it's disturbing to the regular person who says, for God's sake, let's just get on the ground and figure this out together.
• 21:16
  Don Iveson: Amen.
• 21:17
  Don Iveson: And and that's actually that's why it's so sad to be this mad and it's not helpful.
• 21:24
  Don Iveson: Um, and and I'm not gonna say that like Russian bots are behind the the uh the outrage over this, but this is the backdrop of polarization, outrage, and escalation that makes it really hard to solve things like the climate challenge, to solve things like the housing challenge, to grow our economy.
• 21:43
  Don Iveson: And and and I think we have adults at the federal table and and premiers being given the example of what coming together in the way that you're describing looks like.
• 21:55
  Don Iveson: And this is a good thing in this moment of peril for our country.
• 21:58
  Don Iveson: I think that.
• 21:59
  Don Iveson: There's more room to bring local elected officials into that as partners, uh, without, you know, upending the constitution of the whole country or the division of powers.
• 22:10
  Don Iveson: It's more about alignment.
• 22:11
  Don Iveson: And I think that would be the most important thing is if the message from Canadians was stop fighting and work together so that my kids can have housing, so that I can downsize in my neighborhood when I don't want a house and a walk to shovel anymore, but I want to still be close to the cafe and close to the kids who are going to school because they moved into my house that was no longer suitable for me.
• 22:33
  Don Iveson: So that this, like, who does this benefit?
• 22:36
  Don Iveson: Who does who do these changes serve?
• 22:39
  Don Iveson: Um, because that's ultimately a human question, a citizen question, uh, a community question, and a pocketbook issue.
• 22:48
  Don Iveson: So here's here's where here's where I want to make sure that we we cover the affordability dimension of this, which is that there's a general consensus that more density is good for the efficiency of the city from an infrastructure and tax base.
• 23:05
  Don Iveson: So affordability for everyone, to the extent that if new households are on the edge of town, you need new additional infrastructure.
• 23:13
  Don Iveson: And that drives additional car dependency, additional traffic jams, impacts to productivity, impacts to air quality, impacts to public health, and oh, by the way, higher taxes over time because the suburbs do not fully pay for themselves.
• 23:27
  Don Iveson: So this is an affordability issue at the general level for everyone.
• 23:31
  Don Iveson: But as housing supply, close to jobs, close to schools, and on top of infrastructure that's already there and that's oriented for rental for people who need it, whether you're in the basement suite as a single, or whether you're in the townhouse portion on the top for a family that can't afford to buy a house yet, but otherwise would have to be on the edge of town.
• 23:52
  Don Iveson: It's also the housing supply necessary to um help stabilize rents here in Edmonton.
• 24:00
  Don Iveson: And that's been working.
• 24:02
  Don Iveson: And so that's the really that's the unfortunate thing here is that the the city was hands down the leader in the country when it came to supply initiatives.
• 24:15
  Don Iveson: Um and and it was both.
• 24:17
  Don Iveson: It's supply at the edge of town, done denser and more walkable in smart growth suburban communities and through more aggressive density, legalized faster than everyone's comfortable with.
• 24:31
  Don Iveson: But the upside of that has been that this is now the only major big Canadian city that still has affordability, both for buyers and for renters in the market.
• 24:42
  Don Iveson: We don't have enough non-market housing.
• 24:44
  Don Iveson: There's the acute issues still to deal with, but at least we're not losing the middle class in Edmonton.
• 24:51
  Don Iveson: And unfortunately, um, that's what's at stake is the affordability of living in Edmonton.
• 24:58
  Don Iveson: And that was actually, I mean, all the other things we talked about aside, that was the goal of this policy.
• 25:03
  Mary Rowe: You know, it just we're gonna finish here, but just to say time will tell, I want to talk to you when we're on the other side of what's going on in the next week here in Canada.
• 25:10
  Mary Rowe: But my gut reaction on this is that we have examples of really great uh intensification in neighborhoods that have worked very, very well.
• 25:18
  Mary Rowe: And the more that people can be exposed to that to see all the benefits that you just described are accruing to neighborhoods that are increasing density, it'll be an easier thing.
• 25:28
  Mary Rowe: But I think it takes time.
• 25:30
  Mary Rowe: And back to my comment about empathy, we've got to find our way to a common shared path.
• 25:36
  Mary Rowe: I don't think we're there quite yet, just saying.
• 25:40
  Don Iveson: Yeah, you're right.
• 25:41
  Don Iveson: And uh I'm just tired of making the case for it.
• 25:45
  Don Iveson: Because it seems self-evident to me and it's a it's a moment of setback, but it's a time of change, which is interesting for us to be in it together.
• 25:53
  Mary Rowe: Thanks so much for coming back and being with us on City Talk.
• 25:56
  Mary Rowe: I know it's not the last time we'll speak.
• 25:57
  Mary Rowe: There'll be many more occasions.
• 25:59
  Don Iveson: Look forward to the next time, as always.
• 26:01
  Don Iveson: Thank you.
• 26:03
  Mary Rowe: Hey, urban sports fans.
• 26:05
  Mary Rowe: It's actually a double header on City Talk this week, so I hope you'll listen to the next episode with UBC Professor Alexandra Flynn for more conversation about the state of intergovernmental relations across this country.
• 26:18
  Mary Rowe: And a reminder that CUI's annual big conversation, the State of Canada City Summit, is coming up fast.
• 26:24
  Mary Rowe: Join me and hundreds of urban influencers in Ottawa November 12th and 13th by registering at CanUrb.org.
• 26:31
  Mary Rowe: While you're at it, drop us a line at Citytalk at canurb.org to send us your thoughts on this podcast.
• 26:38
  Mary Rowe: Or look for the Talk to Us from Your City link under the episode description to send us an instant text or a video message.
• 26:45
  Mary Rowe: We appreciate hearing from you.
• 26:47
  Mary Rowe: I'm Mary Rowe.
• 26:48
  Mary Rowe: Thanks for listening.