Naheed Nenshi on the surprising things that make Calgary work
Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi says the supposedly individualistic city’s success is based on its openness and a sense that we’re all in this together
An edited interview with Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi – loves people, loves Calgary, loves Canada, loves the future.
You’ve spent almost all your life in Calgary. It’s not the city now that it was when you were a child, and it’s far from the city it was 100 years ago. You, in Alberta, have immense resources, and those resources can generate even greater resources. What can Calgary be in the future?
I often say Calgary is not successful because there are carbon atoms in the ground nearby. The great head office jobs in our glittering office towers could be in Dubai, or Shanghai, or Houston. So we ask ourselves the question, “why is this place so successful?”
The resources are certainly a foundation, but it’s not just because of that. I would argue it’s because of a certain generosity of spirit. A certain openness.
We figured something out here that too many people in the broken world we live in have not figured out. That we are all in this together. That our neighbour’s strength is our strength, and that our neighbour’s pain is our pain, and that we each have a stake in the success of each other. Which sounds like a funny thing to say when you think about the stereotypes of Calgary as a ruggedly individualistic place.
And in some ways it is, but we have to remember it comes from a place in time where you couldn’t build a barn without your neighbours. There’s something very deep. We saw it in the floods last year, of people just looking after one another.
There’s also a sense of openness that allows anyone to succeed here, a remarkable porousness of the social networks in Calgary. Nobody in Calgary cares what you look like, or where you came from, or where you worship, or whom you love.
What people here care about it is what you bring to the table. Are you smart? Are you willing to work hard? Do you have good ideas? And I think that is truly at the core of our success. As a city, as a nation, it’s this sense of openness, that’s what we’ve got in us. That is the core of our success as Canadians. The fact that we can say to anybody, look, you have the opportunity right here, right now to live a great Canadian life.
So it’s the oil in the ground but also a generosity that’s the basis on which any future gets built?
The oil in the ground certainly helps. We need a source of wealth in our community and in our nation. But there are lots of places with lots of oil that have not managed to create a successful, resilient society, and I think that’s the missing ingredient, that generosity, that willingness to share prosperity.
Is the act of community building inherently selfish, because you know that that person will be there for you when you need them? Let me give you a little anecdote. It was the night after the flood, I was walking down a pretty badly devastated street, and I met a woman I’ll call Sam’s mom. Her house had been stripped down to the studs.
“Everything in my house is gone,” she said. “I don’t have a fridge, I don’t have a stove. But you know what Mayor,” she said, “tonight for dinner we had hot shepherd’s pie.” I think about the hands that made that pie, and delivered it to a stranger’s house. And made sure to deliver it when it was hot, with no question of reward. That was my biggest learning in dealing with the flood, just how much people care about one another. I’m sure it would happen everywhere, but I really think it’s what makes this place successful.
The flood is a powerful common experience for people. How do you build on that?
When I look at that power and that resilience of humanity that we saw after the flood, I ask myself all the time, how do we harness that power, to deal with poverty, to deal with homelessness, to deal with the environment, to deal with all these issues we face as a community every single day?
How do we get people to come together as a community the way they do in times of crisis to help us work on all these sorts of things? I wish I knew the answer. But now that we know that power exists, there has got to be a way to leverage it.
There’s a fellow who used to run a terrific non-profit called Brown Bagging for Calgary’s Kids that made lunches for kids who otherwise wouldn’t have nutritious lunches at school. He once said to me, I don’t consider myself successful, because the solution to child hunger is not for me to make even more sandwiches and for volunteers to deliver them every day to every school. It is for every parent to put an extra sandwich into their child’s lunch that they can share with someone in their class.
Business people in Calgary are always telling me that their biggest problem is attracting talented new Canadians into their workplace. One senior executive from a big company complained to me about how poorly we treat our immigrants. He says there’s a guy who has two PhD’s from India and the only job he could get was working in his call centre. I told him, you should get him a better job. Are you sending him to language training so he can overcome the barriers he’s got? If not, don’t blame government policy.
I’ve been asked to give a talk next year. I’m going to call it “A Naive View of Canada,” because I am naive about what we’ve created in this country, and what is possible.
I believe multiculturalism works, that diversity is amazing and is what makes us work, and that we’ve figured something out in Canada that other people in other places haven’t figured out. But I think we need to help to unleash the potential of the nation.
We each have to understand our own responsibility in doing that. It’s not about politicians or business leaders or non-profits taking the initiative. It’s about every one of us having power in our own hands and our own hearts to make change.
A guy tweeted me saying, I love that Calgary has so many festivals in the summer, but they all seem to be downtown. Why aren’t there any festivals in the deep south suburbs where I live? I tweeted back to him, “That is a great idea, here’s some resources to help you organize one, please invite me.”
To commemorate the one-year anniversary of the flood, we’re having something we’re calling neighbour day. All it is is inviting people to be with their neighbours that day. If you have a barbecue, have it in your front yard instead of your backyard and invite your neighbours, or organize a community clean-up together, it doesn’t matter. Just be out with your neighbours.
I think that’s the best way for us to remember what we’ve been through this year and to build those ties, to continue to build our community.
What keeps you awake at night with excitement? What keeps you awake at night with anxiety?
What keeps me awake at night with excitement is just the potential of this place. Potential of what we can accomplish together as a mass of human beings looking out for one another. That if we get out from behind small mindedness, intolerance and hatred in our communities and understand that every human being has potential, then we’ll lead the world in anything we put our minds to. I really do believe that.
What keeps me up at night with anxiety is the exact flipside of that coin. It is small-mindedness and intolerance taking over who were are as a community. There’s lots of concrete things that keep me up at night. I worry about housing. I worry that in a place that is so prosperous, that’s so unequal, that we’re forgetting about the need to lift people out of poverty. I worry about the long-term economic sustainability of our community. And I worry that small-mindedness is going to keep us from tackling these big important issues we need to tackle to make sure our community’s sustainable.
Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi says the supposedly individualistic city’s success is based on its openness and a sense that we’re all in this together
An edited interview with Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi – loves people, loves Calgary, loves Canada, loves the future.
You’ve spent almost all your life in Calgary. It’s not the city now that it was when you were a child, and it’s far from the city it was 100 years ago. You, in Alberta, have immense resources, and those resources can generate even greater resources. What can Calgary be in the future?
I often say Calgary is not successful because there are carbon atoms in the ground nearby. The great head office jobs in our glittering office towers could be in Dubai, or Shanghai, or Houston. So we ask ourselves the question, “why is this place so successful?”
The resources are certainly a foundation, but it’s not just because of that. I would argue it’s because of a certain generosity of spirit. A certain openness.
We figured something out here that too many people in the broken world we live in have not figured out. That we are all in this together. That our neighbour’s strength is our strength, and that our neighbour’s pain is our pain, and that we each have a stake in the success of each other. Which sounds like a funny thing to say when you think about the stereotypes of Calgary as a ruggedly individualistic place.
And in some ways it is, but we have to remember it comes from a place in time where you couldn’t build a barn without your neighbours. There’s something very deep. We saw it in the floods last year, of people just looking after one another.
There’s also a sense of openness that allows anyone to succeed here, a remarkable porousness of the social networks in Calgary. Nobody in Calgary cares what you look like, or where you came from, or where you worship, or whom you love.
What people here care about it is what you bring to the table. Are you smart? Are you willing to work hard? Do you have good ideas? And I think that is truly at the core of our success. As a city, as a nation, it’s this sense of openness, that’s what we’ve got in us. That is the core of our success as Canadians. The fact that we can say to anybody, look, you have the opportunity right here, right now to live a great Canadian life.
So it’s the oil in the ground but also a generosity that’s the basis on which any future gets built?
The oil in the ground certainly helps. We need a source of wealth in our community and in our nation. But there are lots of places with lots of oil that have not managed to create a successful, resilient society, and I think that’s the missing ingredient, that generosity, that willingness to share prosperity.
Is the act of community building inherently selfish, because you know that that person will be there for you when you need them? Let me give you a little anecdote. It was the night after the flood, I was walking down a pretty badly devastated street, and I met a woman I’ll call Sam’s mom. Her house had been stripped down to the studs.
“Everything in my house is gone,” she said. “I don’t have a fridge, I don’t have a stove. But you know what Mayor,” she said, “tonight for dinner we had hot shepherd’s pie.” I think about the hands that made that pie, and delivered it to a stranger’s house. And made sure to deliver it when it was hot, with no question of reward. That was my biggest learning in dealing with the flood, just how much people care about one another. I’m sure it would happen everywhere, but I really think it’s what makes this place successful.
The flood is a powerful common experience for people. How do you build on that?
When I look at that power and that resilience of humanity that we saw after the flood, I ask myself all the time, how do we harness that power, to deal with poverty, to deal with homelessness, to deal with the environment, to deal with all these issues we face as a community every single day?
How do we get people to come together as a community the way they do in times of crisis to help us work on all these sorts of things? I wish I knew the answer. But now that we know that power exists, there has got to be a way to leverage it.
There’s a fellow who used to run a terrific non-profit called Brown Bagging for Calgary’s Kids that made lunches for kids who otherwise wouldn’t have nutritious lunches at school. He once said to me, I don’t consider myself successful, because the solution to child hunger is not for me to make even more sandwiches and for volunteers to deliver them every day to every school. It is for every parent to put an extra sandwich into their child’s lunch that they can share with someone in their class.
Business people in Calgary are always telling me that their biggest problem is attracting talented new Canadians into their workplace. One senior executive from a big company complained to me about how poorly we treat our immigrants. He says there’s a guy who has two PhD’s from India and the only job he could get was working in his call centre. I told him, you should get him a better job. Are you sending him to language training so he can overcome the barriers he’s got? If not, don’t blame government policy.
I’ve been asked to give a talk next year. I’m going to call it “A Naive View of Canada,” because I am naive about what we’ve created in this country, and what is possible.
I believe multiculturalism works, that diversity is amazing and is what makes us work, and that we’ve figured something out in Canada that other people in other places haven’t figured out. But I think we need to help to unleash the potential of the nation.
We each have to understand our own responsibility in doing that. It’s not about politicians or business leaders or non-profits taking the initiative. It’s about every one of us having power in our own hands and our own hearts to make change.
A guy tweeted me saying, I love that Calgary has so many festivals in the summer, but they all seem to be downtown. Why aren’t there any festivals in the deep south suburbs where I live? I tweeted back to him, “That is a great idea, here’s some resources to help you organize one, please invite me.”
To commemorate the one-year anniversary of the flood, we’re having something we’re calling neighbour day. All it is is inviting people to be with their neighbours that day. If you have a barbecue, have it in your front yard instead of your backyard and invite your neighbours, or organize a community clean-up together, it doesn’t matter. Just be out with your neighbours.
I think that’s the best way for us to remember what we’ve been through this year and to build those ties, to continue to build our community.
What keeps you awake at night with excitement? What keeps you awake at night with anxiety?
What keeps me awake at night with excitement is just the potential of this place. Potential of what we can accomplish together as a mass of human beings looking out for one another. That if we get out from behind small mindedness, intolerance and hatred in our communities and understand that every human being has potential, then we’ll lead the world in anything we put our minds to. I really do believe that.
What keeps me up at night with anxiety is the exact flipside of that coin. It is small-mindedness and intolerance taking over who were are as a community. There’s lots of concrete things that keep me up at night. I worry about housing. I worry that in a place that is so prosperous, that’s so unequal, that we’re forgetting about the need to lift people out of poverty. I worry about the long-term economic sustainability of our community. And I worry that small-mindedness is going to keep us from tackling these big important issues we need to tackle to make sure our community’s sustainable.
