Do the Math: A million Calgarians can be wrong

Sometime this week, the population of the City of Calgary will reach one million. In fact, this page saw an item in yesterday's Globe & Mail where a Cowtown PR hack had declared Calgary the third largest city in Canada behind Toronto and Montreal (if one doesn't count the much larger populations of Metro Ottawa or Greater Vancouver). For those of you scoring at home, no one in Vancouver loses only sleep over the fact that Surrey will be the largest city in British Columbia within a few years.

As regular readers are aware, this page has issues with Calgary. Calgary produced Ralph Klein and Stephen Harper. Calgary cheered on scabs during the 1999 Herald strike. Calgary turned its downtown into an armed camp during the 2000 World Petroleum Congress and the 2003 G8 Summit. Calgary bought a tank for its police department. Calgary is what the Bush administration wants Iraq, and pretty much the rest of the world to look like. Calgary is a grandstanding right-wing bully that seriously needs its oversized ass kicked.

Which brings this page to the "biggest" problem about Calgary: by virtue of the farmland and small towns the city has devoured over the past few decades, Calgary is actually the biggest city in Canada. Calgary's million residents sprawl themselves over 701.79 square kilometres* for a population density of 1424 per square kilometre. By contrast, poor little Vancouver can fit about 600,000** into 114.67 square kilometres*, for a density of 5232 per square kilometre.

How can Vancouver fit almost five times the people in the same space? Almost a quarter of us don't own a car, which causes things to be built at a human scale, not an automobile scale. Vancouver may be fenced in by mountains, the ocean, and neighbouring cities, but we also stopped singing "Don't Fence Me In" a long time ago. Size isn't everything, cowboys.

*Statscan

**2006 Projection extrapolated from Statscan