Calgary is on a fast track to two million people. We are appropriately spending a lot of time talking about housing, transit, and infrastructure in light of this population growth, but there is a quieter question to ask with the same urgency: What does this growth mean for our collective mental health, and are we building a city that can support it?
Population growth does not just strain physical systems. It strains human systems, and right now, ours are under extreme pressure. Calgary’s community organizations are stretched to capacity and are serving high acuity clients like never before. Our emergency departments are absorbing mental health crises they were never designed to handle. Families are left to navigate complex systems on their own. People fall through the cracks not because no one cares, but because the system itself is fragmented.
At the same time, we hear a familiar refrain: mental health is a provincial responsibility. Health care sits elsewhere. And while this may be true in legislation, it is not true in real life.
People do not live in jurisdictional silos. They move through housing systems and local economies every day. All of these shape mental health long before someone ever encounters the health-care system. This is not a jurisdictional issue, it’s an “all hands on deck” issue that Calgary deeply needs to embrace as we move toward two million. Which means the question is not who owns mental health. The question is how we design for it, and right now, we are not designing for it; we are reacting to it.
Municipal responses continue to default to safety and call it mental health. We see more crisis response, more policing, and more acute intervention. These, of course, are necessary but they are not prevention. When we treat them as interchangeable, we build a system that is optimized for failure rather than well-being.
If Calgary is serious about becoming a city of two million, mental health cannot sit downstream. It cannot live only in health care, and it cannot be framed primarily as a safety issue. It is core infrastructure, and it is deeply shaped by municipal decisions.
The systems cities design every day are mental health systems. Housing determines stability or precarity. Transportation determines connection or isolation. Urban planning determines whether people feel part of a community or invisible within it. Public spaces determine whether people feel a sense of belonging. Local economies determine stress, security, and opportunity.
And yet, most of our attention remains fixed on visible crisis. We continue to invest heavily at the point where systems break down, and far less where they are designed in the first place.
A systems approach asks us to look earlier and think differently. Are we building neighbourhoods where people actually know each other, or simply live beside one another? Are our systems co-ordinated, or are individuals expected to navigate and stitch them together themselves? Are we using data to understand patterns of need across the city, or reacting one situation at a time?
Calgary does not need to build a new mental health system from scratch. It needs to align the systems it already has and take ownership of the role the city plays in shaping the conditions for well-being. That means moving beyond a narrow focus on safety and investing in prevention and promotion as core functions of city-building. It means embedding mental health into how we design communities, not adding it on after problems emerge.
As Calgary moves toward two million, the real question is not just how many people we can accommodate; it is what kind of city we are building for them. Right now, we are designing a city that responds when people struggle. We have the opportunity to design one that makes it less likely they will.
Meaghon Reid is executive director of Converge Mental Health Coalition.
As part of our special Postmedia Calgary series Countdown to 2 Million, we created a virtual think tank of three dozen community leaders who are sharing their thoughts on how to build the best Calgary.
We’d like to hear and publish your ideas, too. What should Calgarians be doing and thinking about, as our city’s population heads towards 2 million? Email us at reply@calgaryherald.com.