Posted May 22, 2024, 8:32 AM
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Join Date: Mar 2003
Location: pinkoland
Posts: 11,737
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Nice of you to include Edmonton in the conversation. I'll be cheering for the upset..
It'll probably be Ottawa. Ottawa is a microcosm of other bits of Canada you don't really get in the top three--Northern Ontario, provincial Quebec, a homely mid-sized city. It's also the capital, which will never not be a thing. All of the above may make Ottawa boring, but it's actually growing in more interesting ways than Calgary. Zibi and LeBreton Flats--especially if the CCR's mercurial children do the right thing and build the Hull-Ottawa tram loop--will transform the city. I don't know if there's another capital city with a neighbourhood built around a waterfall with sweeping views to the capital buildings perched on a cliff. For all that Ottawa, looking at it from its own downtown, never made sense as a capital city, reorienting its centre over the river makes it make sense.
Calgary, on the other hand, is kind of fun. Trashy and embarrassing, but kind fun. Calgary is basically a creature of the oil industry (bad guys have historically been fun) and its airport, which is a creature of Banff, which is fun. Point is, it makes a good impression in ways we'd probably underrate.
We'll see what happens though. People might like dating Calgary, but once the pipeline work dries up you're left with a VLT-addicted cokehead and that charming tips-the-cowboy-hat thing isn't far removed from tipping a fedora anyway, milady.
Ottawa is probably better positioned to grow into a big city. It has a bigger urban, compared to suburban, footprint, which means it has more space to upzone and grow before it's hemmed in by curvilinear streets, cul-de-sacs, and high-speed roadways. Ottawa's new metro service may have its growing pains, but it's better set up to work as a regional connector, serving a large population, compared to Calgary's mini-commuter trains. We'll see how important that kind of service even is when downtown office jobs aren't. Calgary also made a lot of short-sighted choices in placing C-train stations outside that will prevent easy connection to other transit, limiting its potential to provide more all-purpose service. And Ottawa's location between cities 1 and 2 is better than being the city closest to Banff, the city furthest from Vancouver without having to go to Edmonton or Saskatchewan, or a poor representation of the prairies masquerading as mountains.
Anyway, whether it's Canada's fourth city, Calgary is Western Canada's second city, which makes it the Graz or Debrecen of Western Canada, for what that's worth. And, when you break Canada down into normal-country-sized regions, you realize that isn't worth much. Ottawa, as the third city in a Montreal-Toronto sandwich, gets to be Genova or Valencia--Wroclaw at worst.
I guess the point is, does it matter? What's the fourth city in the US? San Francisco? Houston? How about in Argentina? Or Mexico? Who gives a shit, right?
I was going to say something about Edmonton. If they build a light rail line down Whyte Ave out to Sherwood Park, get infill development to really catch on, and HSR to Calgary happens, they could be the dark horse to win this race. Canada's north is only going to get more important. Edmonton, as it historically was, will emerge as the gateway to the North and a very important city. The sheer math of Edmonton's lead over other northern cities all but guarantees that. But for the time being, this is just potential. Edmonton is clearly the least accomplished of the medium three.
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