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Editor’s note: This op-ed, written by , associate vice-president research (Equity, Diversity and Inclusion) at the University of Calgary, was originally published in the Calgary Herald on March 18. You can read the original .

Stand along the Bow River on a given day and you will hear a dozen varieties of English along with French, Tagalog, Hindi, Punjabi, and many more forming the new ambient sound of a city remaking itself. Calgary has two million residents in its sights. This threshold now asks of the city, its institutions and leaders, more consequential questions.

Calgary is within Treaty 7 territory, home to the Blackfoot Confederacy, the Tsuut’ina, and the Stoney Nakoda peoples, whose stewardship of this land long predates the city and still shapes what responsible relations here require.

Across Canada, rapid growth and everyday affordability have rarely co-existed. Vancouver and Toronto expanded quickly and became prohibitively expensive. Calgary is attempting something harder: to absorb transformation in scale while preserving the accessibility that drew people here. Call it the pluralism dividend: the compounding social, democratic, and economic advantages of diversity embedded in how a city works.

The pluralism dividend begins with who is coming and why. Recent immigrants are more likely than Canadian-born residents to hold university degrees and account for roughly half of those with STEM qualifications. Younger Canadians are leaving other provinces where housing costs and precarious labour markets have foreclosed dreams of promising futures. Calgary’s relative affordability is an attractive pull.

Immigrants start businesses at higher rates than Canadian-born residents, and roughly one in four private-sector firms is immigrant owned. Immigrants enlarge not only the labour force but the pool of job creators. Entrepreneurs with ties across several countries extend our city’s commercial reach through diaspora networks, generating economic relationships that trade policies cannot replicate.

A knowledge economy depends on attracting and retaining talented people. Calgary is already competing for them: its tech workforce is the fastest growing in North America, and Alberta holds the world’s highest concentration of artificial intelligence researchers. Such advantages do not sustain themselves. If governments signal that research and teaching are constrained, they risk undermining the conditions on which a knowledge economy depends.

The pressures growth brings must be taken seriously. Housing costs are rising faster than incomes, threatening the affordability that distinguishes Calgary from Toronto and Vancouver. Transit, schools, and health infrastructure are under visible strain. The cost of institutional delay rises faster than the cost of action. Calgary has met growth with ambition before, and there is an urgency to that tradition holding now.

The pluralism dividend is already visible in Calgary. Once fondly known as Cowtown — a city built around oil, beef, and self-sufficiency — many often regarded metropolitan ambition with suspicion. While that city still exists, alongside it something else is taking shape. Five Calgary restaurants ranked among Canada’s 100 best in 2025; six bars made Canada’s 50 best. Festivals, professional sports, performances and a fuller arts calendar now give the city a more confident urban rhythm than even a decade ago. They signal something more: this is a city with supply chains, skilled labour, and everyday cosmopolitanism that supports innovation and enlarges civic imagination. Cowtown did not disappear. But it no longer tells the whole story.

This story is visible in the qualities of daily life the city still makes possible. Calgary continues to rank among the world’s most livable cities, and its pathway system, one of North America’s most extensive urban trail networks linking rivers, parks, and neighbourhoods, makes public space part of daily life. In a competition where skilled workers choose where to live as carefully as where to work, such qualities shape which cities attract and retain talent.

Whether these gains endure will depend on institutions that widen access, infrastructure that nurtures opportunity, and inclusive leadership capable of governing a larger, more plural city with imagination and policies grounded in research. Calgary still possesses something Toronto and Vancouver lost before they fully grasp what was slipping away: it’s the unusual coexistence of growth, relative accessibility, and room to grow public capacity before those advantages harden into scarcity. The question is whether, 20 years from now, two million people will still find here a city equal to the hope and promise of this moment.