I have been listening to governments describe themselves as open for business since roughly the time interest rates ran to double digits. The phrasing changes. Open for business. Open for investment. Now open for growth. The sentiment is always sincere and the outcome is never automatic.
On May 21, Dan Williams, Minister of Municipal Affairs, stood in front of nearly 230 industry members and municipal representatives in the Edmonton region and said it plainly. “We’re open for growth.”
Good. It is the right thing to say and it is said too rarely in this country. It is also, on the day it is spoken, only a sentence. What separates a sentence from a policy is measurable, and Albertans should hold on to the measurement rather than the applause.
What a slogan has to survive
Consider how a phrase like that gets tested. Not in the speech. Not in the coverage the following morning. It gets tested eighteen months later, at a counter in a municipal office, when a file that should take ninety days takes two hundred and seventy, and nobody at any level of government is obliged to explain the difference.
That is where the last several decades of Canadian housing policy went to die. Not in bad intentions. In accumulated friction, applied one review at a time, by people who each had a reasonable justification for their own step and no responsibility whatsoever for the total.
A young couple does not experience housing policy as a framework. They experience it as a number on a mortgage application and a possession date that keeps moving. Every month a file sits idle is a month of carrying cost, and carrying cost is not absorbed by the system that caused it. It is passed to the buyer, in full, at the end.
Alberta has already put numbers on the table
What makes this particular declaration more interesting than the ones I have heard before is that some of the mechanics already exist.
The province has committed to a 120-day approval timeline, which is a real number attached to a real clock. A clock is the rarest thing in public administration. It converts an aspiration into a deadline somebody can be measured against, and it gives a builder something to finance against rather than hope for.
Set that beside the costs that arrive before construction begins. We have written before about a surcharge before the first shovel, the money a project pays out long before a wall goes up. Those charges are the arithmetic buried inside a house price, and they compound with every month of delay, because the money is spent and the asset earns nothing until the keys change hands.
Open for growth, honoured properly, means both halves. Faster decisions and honest costs. Speed alone is not enough if the fee schedule keeps climbing. Lower costs are not enough if the file sits for a year.
The room mattered as much as the message
Nearly 230 people were in that room, and the composition is the part I would draw attention to. Builders and municipal representatives, together, in the same session, hearing the same commitment at the same time.
That matters because housing in this province is delivered by three parties who rarely share a table. The province sets the rules. The municipality issues the permits. The builder carries the risk and the debt. When those three only meet in writing, through applications and appeals and consultant reports, the friction is invisible to everyone except the person paying the mortgage at the end of it.
Katrina Rowe, President of Cantiro Communities, was there as the outgoing Board Chair of BILD Edmonton Metro, alongside Scott Fash, CEO of BILD Alberta. Williams made a second point that afternoon which is worth repeating without ornament, that the way we shape our communities ends up shaping the people who live in them. That is a longer horizon than most public speaking allows for, and it is the correct one.
The standard is the province’s own
I want to be careful here, because there is a version of this column that reads as a press release and a version that reads as cynicism, and neither is honest.
The honest version is this. Alberta has said something clear and specific in front of the people who would know if it were untrue. That is more than most jurisdictions in this country manage. The standard being set here was not imposed on Alberta by anyone. The province chose it, said it out loud, and attached numbers to parts of it.
So the follow up is not a matter of doubt. It is a matter of arithmetic. In a year, someone should be able to put two figures side by side, the average days to approval before and after, and the answer will settle the question without a single adjective.
Governments have said open for business before. Very few of them ever published the before and after. The ones that did earned something a slogan cannot buy, which is the belief of the people who have to build the thing.
What single number would convince you that open for growth turned into policy rather than a good line?
