Across Canada, collaboration between neighbours is as old as the country is old. Over the decades, collaboration meant building churches together, building community halls and curling rinks together and having a barn dance together with everyone in the neighbourhood attending. Today, collaborating over water supply, solid waste management, building bridges and handling sewage are all examples where two or more municipalities work together to provide services for residents across municipal boundaries. Such collaboration is foundational to service provision in today’s modern Canada.
Collaboration includes mutually assisting each other for firefighting support, policing and social programs (like family and community support services). These are examples that require the political will of respective neighbouring councils to ensure cost-effective service is provided to everyone they serve.
As costs continue to rise for all services and as Albertans face large property tax increases (often reported in the 3-10 per cent range), taxpayers are expecting their municipal elected officials to seek efficiencies and employ cost management oversight to keep tax increases at a minimum. Not every community can afford a new fire truck, a new recreation centre or paid 24/7 firefighting staff.
Municipal officials need to be adults about neighbour-to-neighbour collaboration, and it appears at times that is not the case in Alberta. Those neighbours who collaborated cutting trees to help build power lines 75 years ago and collaborated to dig post holes for installing telephone lines 75 years ago across Canada would be disappointed to see how uncooperative many politicians have become.
Municipalities working with their commissions, inter-municipal collaboration frameworks, cost sharing agreements, service sharing and asset sharing must continue to improve, not become worse. It is the municipal and school board election year in 2025 and we need to be asking our prospective elected officials if their schools can better share playgrounds, instead of building new ones and if municipalities can better share their hard assets instead of buying new ones.
Municipalities need to find new ways to share employees who specialize in their field. Examples might include planners, accountants and bylaw officers. Residents should be asking questions about these aspects to those wanna-be councillors who are seeking our votes 2025.
The financial capabilities of municipalities may continue to result in the demise of some of the villages in Alberta. This is something that has been occurring at a frequency of about one village per year “dissolving” (surrounding county assumes responsibility) for each of the past 100 years.
In 2024, active viability reviews being performed in Alberta included the villages of Ma-Me-O Beach, Bittern Lake, Delia and Halkirk. That trend will likely continue into the foreseeable future as villages find themselves to be less and less viable with the current cost and revenue structure that exists.
Annexations, when relationships between neighbours are hostile, are expensive. When municipalities do not collaborate on what is expected within their collaboration framework, it costs taxpayers money. Regions that do not collaborate on such matters as public transit and policing cost taxpayers money. Regions that do not collaborate on matters such as economic development or hosting regional sporting events cost taxpayers money.
If we do not see an increased emphasis on collaboration in the next decade, the viability of villages and small towns will be at even greater risk. Affordable tax rates for urban municipalities are at most risk compared to rural municipalities. Collaboration will help because “a rising tide lifts all ships” and Albertans need to demand collaboration, or else boot out the politicians who don’t get it.
And that, folks, is how it should really work.
Nolan Crouse was mayor of St. Albert from 2007 to 2017.
