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City parks staff steward some of our most vital yet undervalued public assets: urban parks and green spaces. These areas are far more than patches of grass, they are dynamic community hubs, crucial environmental infrastructure, and essential public health resources.
The annual Canadian City Parks Report (CCPR) equips municipal park staff, community advocates, non-profits, and the public with data and stories that make the case for parks. Between 2019 and 2024, the annually released report illuminated trends, challenges, and opportunities in how we plan, manage, and experience our shared green spaces. Forty-six municipalities participated over these years, collectively representing 48% of Canada’s population.
This report synthesizes the major findings from the CCPR over these pivotal years. It serves as a curated and thematically organized index of data and stories from across the years, with comments on the trends we witnessed through that time.
1- Health Imperative: Parks as Essential Public Health Investment
One of the most consistent trends across the CCPR data is the growing use and recognition of city parks as essential public spaces, a shift dramatically accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic. What were once considered amenities are now firmly recognized as critical spaces that support the mental and physical health and well-being of city residents.
2- The Funding Gap: Resources and Capacity Constraints
Despite documented increases in park use and public valuing of parks, municipalities report ongoing financial and staffing constraints that limit their capacity to maintain and enhance park systems.
3- Environmental Function: Climate Adaptation and Biodiversity
Urban parks serve important environmental functions, particularly in climate adaptation and supporting urban biodiversity, roles that have gained increased attention as climate impacts intensify. Parks are more and more understood as ‘upstream solutions’ for the environmental and economic impacts of extreme weather events.
4- Equity and Access: Addressing Systemic Barriers
Participating municipalities reported on their efforts to address equity, inclusion, and reconciliation in park planning and management, reflecting broader societal reckonings with systemic barriers to park access and enjoyment.
5- Evolving Practice: Community Engagement and Complex Operations
Park management now encompasses complex social dimensions beyond traditional maintenance, including community engagement strategies and navigation of challenging urban issues that intersect with public space.
How the park sector can meet today’s complex challenges through partnerships and collaboration.
How Addressing Conflict and Reframing Challenges as Opportunities Can Create More Equitable and Sustainable Parks.
How collaboration, mindfulness, and power-sharing in parks can help nurture and repair relationships between ourselves, our communities, and the wider natural world.
How parks can help create more equitable, resilient cities—not only as we recover from COVID-19, but as we address another looming crisis: climate change.
Trends, challenges, and leading practices in Canadian cities to inspire action, share learning, and track progress in city parks across the country.
Park People launches the first Canadian City Parks Report, highlighting park trends, challenges, and leading practices in Canadian cities.
The Canadian City Parks Report finds tight parks budgets, increasingly extreme weather events, and changing use of parks by residents are challenging cities across the country. But it also finds many cities are leading the way on solutions through an increasing focus on collaborative partnerships, proactive parks planning, and inclusive engagement practices.
In the report, we share:
Budgets tight while populations grow
Cities across Canada are experiencing budget constraints at the same time as growing populations and changing demographics create demand for more parks, amenities, and programming.Resilience must be scaled up. As instances of extreme weather increase, additional pressure is placed on park systems to absorb effects, like flooding. While cities are piloting green infrastructure in parks, there is a need to scale up and standardize these efforts. We found only 48% of cities have citywide green infrastructure strategies that includes parks.
The future is connected
Population growth and urban development is necessitating a focus on proactive parks planning and creative methods to expand and connect parks. Currently 70% cities have updated park system master plans.
Partnerships are powerful
Cities are developing non-profit partnerships and collaborations with resident groups to bring creative programming, alternative funding, and specialized knowledge to help meet new demands on city parks. We found 74% of cities currently have at least one non-profit park partnership.
Inclusion means going deeper
Cities are beginning the work of ensuring parks foster inclusion by exploring their own policies and practices, increasing accessibility, and developing programs for newcomers.
Happy reading!
Park People launches the second annual Canadian City Parks Report, highlighting the trends, challenges, and leading practices in Canadian cities to inspire action, share learning, and track progress in city parks across the country.
As we worked on stories about biodiversity, creative park development, community engagement, and homelessness, the world changed around us. But it quickly became apparent that these stories were not made irrelevant, but more urgent than ever.
This year, the report highlights new city park insights to shape the future of biodiversity, creative park development, community engagement, and approaches to homelessness in city parks.
In the report, we weave together the themes we heard from conversations with city staff with the data we gathered from our surveys of 27 municipalities and nearly 3,500 residents of Canadian cities.
How urban biodiversity improves our well-being and why that matters even more during COVID-19.
How we can both deepen the conversation about biodiversity and broaden it to include more people
Why habitat corridors are important for urban biodiversity and what cities are doing to make sure parks large and small are connected
As populations and development boom in many cities, finding space for new parks is creating challenges—and spurring innovation
How creative community groups and city support are growing connections through food in parks.
Park People launches the third annual Canadian City Parks Report on Centring Equity and Resilience: How parks can help create more equitable, resilient cities—not only as we recover from COVID-19, but as we address another looming crisis: climate change.
Park use during the pandemic spiked across the country as people flooded into outdoor spaces to seek safe ways to connect with others, experience nature, and get some exercise. Parks became more important to Canadians in their daily lives, but cities also faced new challenges with rising demands and public health considerations.
In the report, we weave together the themes we heard from conversations with city staff with the data we gathered from our surveys of 32 municipalities and nearly 3,500 residents of Canadian cities.
Dive into the pdf to read about our key insights on trends and challenges in city parks:
How climate change is impacting how we plan, design, and maintain parks.
Whether converting streets to cool green oases, designing parks that celebrate water, or re-naturalizing the mouths of entire rivers, these eight Canadian projects point a way forward to more climate resilient cities.
How using an environmental justice lens can help tackle climate change resilience and inequity in parks.
Moving more towards nature-based solutions that view parks as key pieces of green infrastructure.
How Canadian cities can harness the power of park philanthropy—and address some of its challenges
How BIPOC park leaders are centring conversations of justice and power in parks
Park People launches the fourth annual Canadian City Parks Report on Nurturing Relationships & Reciprocity: How collaboration, mindfulness, and power-sharing in parks can help nurture and repair relationships between ourselves, our communities, and the wider natural world.
This year’s report begins to move beyond the impacts of the pandemic to explore how the lessons we’ve learned over the last two years can point the way toward more equitable and creative ways of planning, designing, and programming parks.
In the report, we weave together the themes we heard from conversations with city staff with the data we gathered from our surveys of 30 municipalities and over 3,000 residents of Canadian cities.
How leaders from across the country are using different methods to promote a sense of connection to nature by meeting people where they’re at
How we can foster a greater sense of connection to nature through awareness, reciprocity, and gratitude—and why that matters.
How the pandemic has impacted park budgets and sparked a heightened focus on the importance of equity-led investment.
How park engagement can lay the foundation for relationships that last well beyond the end of a consultation period
How investing in ongoing trust-building beyond one-off consultations can help to repair relationships, redistribute power, and reimagine parks.
The unique opportunity of parks departments to play a positive role in addressing houselessness
Examining Prairie cities’ efforts to decolonize park spaces and honour the Indigenous histories of the land they are built upon
How collaborative funding approaches, and investment from other levels of government, are opening up new ways to support parks.
This case study is part of the 2022 Canadian City Parks Report, showcasing Inspiring projects, people, and policies from across Canada that offer tangible solutions to the most pressing challenges facing city parks.
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As advocates have pushed for action on issues ranging from policing, to houselessness, to racial justice, the past two years have brought to light fractured relationships, mistrust, and frustration. But equally, these efforts have highlighted that communities are eager to have their voices heard.
“There’s much more attention that’s being placed on the city and the city’s choices by residents and by advocacy communities,” said Dr. Alexandra Flynn, a University of British Columbia professor and municipal governance expert. Dr. Flynn noted that parks have been a key space of protest and pushback and “expectations are very high that municipalities are going to be responsive.”
At the same time, however, the pandemic has turned park engagement on its head. When Covid-19 first hit, in-person consultations became impossible, leading cities to go virtual, with 81% reporting increased use of online engagement methods.
But the impacts on park engagement go deeper than the shift from in-person to online.
Early in the pandemic, cities rushed to establish pilot projects, like converting streets into pop-up parklets and loosening bylaws on alcohol consumption. In the urgency to respond to emerging needs, engagement was often rushed or bypassed altogether. Fast forward to this year: 92% of cities we surveyed said that they had extended or made permanent at least one park pilot program initiated in response to Covid.
Dr. Flynn, who studied municipal governance during the pandemic, terms this shift in engagement “pop-up governance.”
“It’s easy to be in favour of pop-up governance when you really like the outcome,” Dr. Flynn said, noting that public space expansions have been popular among many urbanists. But the process is inherently undemocratic, said Dr. Flynn, noting that cities “leveraged the pandemic, in some ways, to not engage.”
For Dr. Flynn, this raises questions about “why did [these projects] have to happen without engagement? And does that speak to larger issues with the existing processes?” In her view, “governance models even outside of the pandemic, in most jurisdictions, really aren’t able to appropriately address the engagement needs of people who want to be weighing in” on park decision-making.
Indeed, our survey results found that only 22% of city residents feel they have the ability to influence what goes on in their local park—a decrease from 34% in last year’s report.
As cities shift from addressing immediate pandemic needs to planning for the future, there is an opportunity to rethink community engagement to give communities more decision-making power on the park issues that affect them most, said Koa Thornhill, a Program Manager at Park People with expertise working with equity-deserving communities.
As Thornhill put it, grassroots advocacy movements during the pandemic have “brought us to this beautiful point of thinking about, how do we decentralize some of the power that exists in [institutional] spaces?”
Shifting power means moving beyond one-off project-based consultations toward ongoing relationship-building with communities. This requires recognizing and valuing that communities know their needs best.
Zahra Ebrahim, Co-founder of Monumental and Park People Board Chair, said that investing time and resources in building meaningful community relationships upfront is well worth the effort “so that when you actually get to those places where you do need to do some really acute engagement… There are deep relationships.” As Ebrahim put it, “It’s a reorientation to how we come together and build partnerships—that is, going slow to go fast.”
The City of Edmonton is putting this approach into practice. Through their RECOVER Urban Wellness initiative, city-supported ‘social prototypes’ explore creative models for engaging with equity-deserving communities. One of the 2021 prototypes, called Auricle, asks “what would it look like for a city to engage citizens in more humble and authentic ways, deeply listening and understanding what wellbeing means to them?”
The project involved hiring a team of 10 Local Listeners—community members living in Edmonton’s Alberta Avenue neighbourhood—to engage neighbours using storytelling methods. Through this process, the Listeners collected over 150 stories, which were then shared back to the community at an event called Knowsy Fest. The festival, a celebration of community knowledge, invited residents to interpret the stories themselves, and share ideas for how the city might use their insights.
Azkaa Rahman, Strategic Planning Analyst at the City of Edmonton and part of the RECOVER team, said that this kind of community engagement “requires a paradigm shift towards deeply recognizing that relationships move at the pace of trust.”
“Having the time and resources dedicated to relationship building can be tough when we’re on taxpayers’ dime,” Rahman said. “Given that impact isn’t seen in the immediate term, people may have a hard time justifying why just ‘listening’ and fostering relationships is worthwhile.” But for Rahman, this approach is essential to make meaningful change in communities.
When it comes to building relationships, it’s important to be sensitive to neighbourhood dynamics, said Dr. Flynn. Connecting with communities that have been historically well-served by government may be relatively straightforward, but “there’s a lot of communities who don’t share that same trust,” she said.
To understand the unique priorities that exist in each neighbourhood, Ebrahim and her colleagues suggest that cities undertake neighbourhood-based “equity impact assessments” every few years.
This would involve co-creating neighbourhood profiles using demographic data to provide insight into how to tailor engagement methods to meet local needs—such as providing childcare where there’s a high proportion of single parents, or translating materials into commonly spoken languages.
Brampton’s Nurturing Neighbourhoods platform provides a useful model for relationship and trust building. The program was created in response to a commitment in the Brampton 2040 Vision strategy to conduct neighbourhood audits to identify priorities for ongoing, incremental improvements in neighbourhoods based on collaboration with residents.
For 2021, the Nurturing Neighbourhoods program offered guided virtual walking tours in each of the city’s neighbourhoods. The tours highlighted local parks, businesses, and community spaces, and emphasized ways residents could engage in their community. The tours were complemented by neighbourhood-specific online surveys and interactive mapping tools which invited residents to mark locations where they have concerns or ideas for improvement. The insights generated are then used to create a long-term action plan for each neighbourhood.
Kelowna is also moving toward a neighbourhood-centred approach to community engagement. The city is working with neighbourhood associations to “decentralize park programming [and] introduce park amenities and programs that better reflect the needs of the local community,” city staff said.
Koa Thornhill echoed the importance of cities committing to “hav[ing] strong ties to local organizations,” and also pointed out the opportunity to connect with residents directly through existing on-the-ground staff.
Parks maintenance staff, for example, could see it as their role to maintain human relationships the same way they maintain the grass. Thornhill recommended providing on-the-ground parks staff with “training to maintain and navigate relationships.” She noted it could boost morale by “help[ing] them see that community members are really grateful for the work that they do and it doesn’t go unseen.”
In thinking through how to strengthen relationships with communities, results from our national survey of 150 community park groups provide insight on how municipalities can move forward.
63% of cities said they had a strong relationship with local community park groups, but when asked the same question, only 44% of community groups said they had a strong relationship with the city. This number was even lower, at 38%, for groups that identified as equity-deserving. This discrepancy highlights that community relationships may not be as strong as city staff perceive.
The good news is that 83% of community groups said they’d be interested in deepening their relationship with their municipality. When asked what cities could offer to support community groups’ work, some common themes emerged:
Above all, what groups are looking for is to be recognized as valued collaborators working toward a shared goal of ensuring that parks best serve communities. As one group put it, “We need municipalities to trust us; the people who look after these spaces often are the most knowledgeable about what it needs because we are there every day.”
Dr. Alexandra Flynn is hopeful that we can work toward this future, noting that “municipalities are full of lots of people who care very deeply and passionately about these issues.” When communities and cities commit to working together better, it’s a powerful pairing for parks.
Park engagement has been transformed by the pandemic. In our survey, 92% of cities said Covid has changed how they engage communities, and 23% said engagement has become a greater priority since the start of the pandemic.
As we’ve written elsewhere in the Canadian City Parks Report, it’s not just the format of engagement that has changed as cities shift from in-person to online methods. Cities are also sharpening their focus on building relationships with groups that have historically been left out, with 35% reporting that the pandemic has prompted more intentional outreach to equity-deserving groups.
“There is new awareness about systemic inequity, and creating equity in our park system means talking with those most affected.”
City staff, Gelph
This work is needed. Our public survey showed that equity-deserving groups face disproportionate barriers to participating in city-led park planning processes. Overall, the top three barriers respondents cited were: being unsure of how to get involved (36%), unsure if their participation would make a difference (31%), and not having enough time to participate (28%). These percentages were higher for respondents who identified as Black, Indigenous or a person of colour (BIPOC), at 48%, 35%, and 36%, respectively.
Cities and community groups across the country are responding to these barriers through creative methods that put equity at the fore.
It is vital to involve communities in deciding what the engagement process looks like, said Jennifer Chan, Co-founder and CEO of the Department of Imaginary Affairs (DIA) . Last summer, the organization led a project called A Tale of Two Parks to surface stories of safe and unsafe experiences that exist at the same park. Through the project, six racialized youth were hired as Social Researchers to engage park goers, especially BIPOC communities, in two Toronto parks.
Through conversations with community members at the park, the DIA team learned that park goers often have great ideas for changes they’d like to see, but community members often felt that “it doesn’t really matter what our ideas are, since the city doesn’t care about us” Chan said. “This statement really struck me in thinking about, how can we meaningfully engage with community when the starting perspective is that ‘the city doesn’t care about us?'”
In response, the DIA designed a participatory planning game called “What if Parks Were Designed By Us?” The game allows participants to experience and define a months-long planning process in a matter of minutes. It invites community members to work together to develop their own planning process, strengthening their ability as a community to identify issues, build a unified vision, and even practice dealing with monkey wrenches getting thrown into their plan.
By gamifying the planning process, DIA aims to reduce barriers to existing planning processes as well envision new possibilities for park engagement, shifting away from traditional mechanisms like town halls “where all the power is held by the city, not with the community,” Chan said.
The City of Toronto has been engaging residents for the Toronto Island Park Master Plan since 2020, which will set out a new vision for a beloved destination park accessible by ferry just minutes from downtown. It’s a signature project that involves many stakeholders, as the Island is meant to serve all Torontonians.
A key priority for the engagement team is embedding an equity lens throughout the process. “Equity really is framed by identifying who is and who isn’t at the table,” said Daniel Fusca, the city’s Manager of Consultation for Parks, Forestry and Recreation.
The process started with a pre-engagement phase—a new approach for the division. This involved meeting with relevant community organizations, Indigenous partners, and other departments within the city, to get a sense of their priorities and determine how they wanted to be involved.
The pre-engagement phase “goes against most people’s instincts of what is appropriate engagement,” Fusca said. There’s an expectation, rooted in conventional engagement practices, to “put something in front of the public for them to react to or else it’s a waste of their time.”
“It took a bit of work to convince everybody that this is actually a good idea,” Fusca said. “There’s a bit of getting people out of their comfort zone.”
The pre-engagement with the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation (MCFN) and other Indigenous partners was especially vital given the significance of the Islands as a sacred place of healing and ceremony. Through these conversations, the city heard about the importance of incorporating ceremony into the engagement events, and re-working their land acknowledgment to recognize the waters as well as the lands.
They also heard that each Indigenous partner had different collaboration preferences. Some rights holders preferred regular meetings with the city. For the urban Indigenous communities, they’ve held sharing circles during each phase which are led by an Indigenous facilitator—something the community identified as important.
Lori Ellis, Project Officer of Strategic Projects, acknowledged that the pre-engagement took time and required them to adjust their original scope of work. “But it’s worth its weight in gold in regards to building that foundation of trust and transparency,” she said, noting that the city is now looking to incorporate a pre-engagement phase into future projects.
It’s also laid a foundation for ongoing collaboration with different communities to share back how their input has been used. The project team has tried to make these touchpoints meaningful by tailoring them to the community’s specific interests and input, Fusca said. “We would hone in the presentation to just focus on the things that were most meaningful to them and try to reflect back anything they told us,” he shared.
Constantly scanning to “identify the key voices that are still missing, and to do our best to address that” has been another strategy at the heart of the city’s approach, Fusca said. For example, after identifying that youth and racialized communities living outside of the downtown core were underrepresented in the first phase of engagement, they developed a Youth Ambassador Program.
The program hired a team of 10 youth between the ages of 15 to 27 who collectively spoke nine different languages and lived in neighbourhoods outside of the downtown core. They were provided with training and a budget to design their own outreach program to engage their communities.
Pablo Muñoz, a Senior Public Consultation Coordinator for the city who has previous experience as a youth worker, noted the important role youth play as conduits of information to and from the community. “For a lot of immigrant and refugee families, children and youth tend to be the connection to the Canadian English-speaking world. They tend to be the translators, and in many ways, have a big leadership role,” he said. This is a finding echoed in recent Park People research that explored barriers to park engagement in Vancouver’s equity-deserving neighbourhoods.
Another learning from the process is that despite the breadth of audiences involved in the project, it’s been important to hold space to go deeper through small group workshops centred on equity.
Some workshops included visioning exercises guided by Bob Goulais, an Anishinaabe facilitator, where participants closed their eyes to envision the future of the Islands. “It’s a much different way than bureaucratic engagement, where we’re going inwards and acknowledging a little bit more of the soul and the spirit,” said Muñoz.
Other initiatives included an “equity and belonging deep-dive,” and a video interview with activists and historians about the LGBTQ2S+ history of Hanlan’s Point, a clothing-optional beach on the Islands.
At these sessions, “the turnout would be smaller, but the conversation would be much richer. None of these conversations ever went the way you thought that they were going to go. And they always were incredibly meaningful,” Muñoz said.
What other cities are doing:
Zahra Ebrahim, Co-founder of Monumental and Park People Board Chair, said that when it comes to deepening engagement, in many ways cities are “set up to fail.” Through research to inform the Making Space toolkit—a resource for engaging equity-deserving communities in planning processes—Ebrahim and her team learned that cities may face internal barriers to implementing meaningful processes.
However, many of these issues could be addressed through “simple intervention points,” Ebrahim said:
The ongoing discoveries of unmarked graves has forced Canada to reckon with its ongoing legacy of residential schools as part of the colonial tactics that strived for Indigenous erasure. Municipalities, street names, secondary and post-secondary institutions have all been under pressure to change names that step away from the colonial figures they were named after.Canada was born the moment settlers began claiming land, creating borders, and dispossessing First Nations, Métis and Inuit peoples. And while the ongoing effects of colonization can look vastly different across geographies, the prairies in particular trace land theft and displacement of Indigenous livelihood to agricultural opportunities that allowed white settlement to prosper. For Indigenous Peoples, this meant a violent history of land extraction, residential schools, and starvation methods through buffalo extinction and government policy.Inherently, cities remain a site of dispossession, and the land on which city parks exist are no exception. Nahomi Amberer reminds us of the pre-existing relationship with land Indigenous people held prior to contact, and how this relationship was undermined by land dispossession by European settlers, including land used today for parks. “Dividing up land was central to claiming ownership of a land already inhabited by Indigenous Peoples,” she wrote in last year’s Canadian City Parks Report. Indigenous Peoples continue to be reminded of these violent histories often; whether driving through the country or walking through an urban neighbourhood, place-names continue to honour colonial figureheads who played instrumental roles in the genocide against Indigenous populations. However, city spaces can also be a site of mass education. So, how do we create spaces that decentralize the colonial past and instead, promote Indigenous knowledges?
Over the past year, a handful of prairie city parks have taken steps towards decolonizing public spaces, making room for Indigenous histories in a way that hadn’t been done before. This is a particularly important step for prairie cities that reflect some of the highest urban Indigenous populations across the country. Further, city parks moving towards the process of decolonizing space provides urban Indigenous folks access to nature and ceremony without the barrier of having to leave the city.
Take Winnipeg – Canada’s largest urban Indigenous population – and the Indigenous Peoples Garden as a start. Anna Huard, Manager of Education and Programs at Assiniboine Park Conservancy described the Garden as a massive joint effort of community consultation, Matriarchs, Knowledge Keepers, Elders, and an Indigenous architecture firm. “It’s important that the consultation process on a project like this includes a lot of different connections,” she said. “As soon as others were able to help out, it started to feel like a community. We cannot just rely on one Indigenous spokesperson.”Native plant species helped guide the Garden’s development, and to further community inclusion, Indigenous youth also had a hand in planting trees and building boardwalks. The park includes fire and water nodes as well as interpretive signage that includes ancestral languages of Ojibway, Cree, Dakota, Oji-Cree, Michif, Dene and Inuktitut translations.
With last summer being the Garden’s launch, Huard is ready to see the space used more frequently for youth storytelling programs, language learning, and an Indigenous plants program that includes a guided tour and salve-making classes. Most importantly, Huard noted that the space provides urban Indigenous folks the opportunity to strengthen their understanding of land and culture within city limits.
The city of Regina also experienced a big leap forward in decolonizing park spaces recently. Last year, the city finally caved to public pressure to relocate the Sir. John A. MacDonald statue in Victoria Park in downtown Regina. Although grassroots initiatives and petitions for the statue’s removal have been circulating for a few years, the city’s website stated that in March of 2021, city council approved the relocation of the statue to storage, “while Administration proceeds with broader public engagement and working with partners to identify an appropriate future location and contextualization.”Further, the Buffalo Peoples Art Institute (BPAI), a grassroots community organization driven by social justice in Regina, played a significant role in advocating for the name change of an inner-city public park. In spring of last year, the city officially changed Dewdney Park in the North Central neighbourhood to Buffalo Meadows Park due to ongoing pressure from organizations like BPAI and public community support. The city also voted in favor to change Dewdney Pool to Buffalo Meadows Pool. Edgar Dewdney was a colonial figure who administered and oversaw residential school policies and the starvation crisis faced by Indigenous Peoples in Canada.Joely BigEagle-Kequahtooway, a member of the White Bear First Nation and a resident of Regina, said she started the Institute to help re-educate prairie learners about the significance of the buffalo’s presence before its erasure. She explained that Regina, often referred to as ‘Pile of Bones’ because of its creation literally being built on the bones of buffalo, must acknowledge the original histories of the land. “This was buffalo land before colonization,” she said.Advocating for the name change started a few years ago, and eventually led to public awareness campaigns through community barbeques and petition signing. After enough signatures were collected, the grassroots group and their allies presented the petition to the city council and the civic naming committee. The city vote to rename the park was successful, but the BPAI is still waiting for the approval to change a major street name, Dewdney Avenue to Buffalo Avenue, as well.The park’s name change encourages a reconnection to the land and is crucial for Regina’s north central community where many Indigenous people reside, BigEagle-Kequahtooway explained. “Even in an urban setting, our environment should reflect who we are as a community,” she said. “We need to determine whether the legacies of [colonial figures] are something we want to emulate or preserve for the future, and further question whether those names play a role moving forward in the spirit of Truth and Reconciliation.”
BPAI plans to continue to bring awareness to the buffalo’s history on the plains through public art installations, courses on preparing buffalo hides, and hosting an annual buffalo festival all in the newly named park.
The city of Edmonton also had a big year for centering Indigenous knowledges in parks as construction on the kihciy askiy park (Cree for Sacred Land) started in Whitemud Park last year.
The park has been 15 years in the making after the city received a proposal from the Indigenous Elders Cultural Resource Society outlining an urban cultural site where Indigenous people could practice cultural ceremony and learning opportunities. Although long overdue, the city’s website acknowledges that “long before becoming farmland, the kihciy askiy site was used for many centuries by the Indigenous people foraging for medicines for healing purposes.”After forming a Counsel of Elders in 2015 to work alongside a city project team, the city followed cultural leadership throughout the park’s entire design process. Alongside consultation from Elders and Knowledge Keepers, the city has also called upon the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Calls to Action, the MMIWG Calls for Justice, and United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples to help guide the work.“Consistent with Indigenous culture of respecting the land, the project is designed to be completely synchronized within its location in the Edmonton River Valley,” Chelsea Burden, City of Edmonton’s Project Manager shared. With this in mind, the city also conducted an Environmental Impact Assessment to ensure the construction of the site results in minimal destruction to native plant and tree species along the River Valley.
The park’s development plans include spaces for ceremony and sweats, the opportunity to grow medicinal native species plants, and the infrastructure to host culture camps and talking circles. The park plans to officially open in early 2023.
As more graves continue to be uncovered, the urgency to recognize Indigenous history and presence must be prioritized. Acknowledging that colonialism continues to have a devastating impact while actively making changes led by the Indigenous community with ancestral ties to the land are two processes that can and should happen in tandem.
For example, in January of 2022, Vancouver’s Park Board chair Stuart McKinnon presented a motion that calls for the co-management of city parks that fall under the traditional territory of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh nations. “I think it’s important as we recognize reconciliation in this country, that the land Vancouver sits on was occupied land,” McKinnon shared in a CBC article.
There is still plenty of work left to undo the colonial violence of the past, and governments at the municipal, provincial and federal level should actively engage in meaningful Indigenous consultation to lead the creation of cultural learning spaces in city parks as a starting point. In order to achieve successful consultation, engagement strategies must build authentic relationships with multiple Indigenous community members and respectfully make space for varying Indigenous worldviews. Further, municipalities must acknowledge that empowering Indigenous community members to lead educational programming, park signage, language camps, and plant/medicine gardens also empowers the community as a whole. Doing so promotes a way forward that allows urban Indigenous presence to access aspects of ceremony and tradition, and in turn, allows non-Indigenous people to learn more about the original stewards of the lands they occupy.
And perhaps above all, working alongside one another in mutual respect is one way to honour the spirit in which Treaty relationships were built upon.
It’s a tale as old as time—or at least as old as parks department budgets. As cities grow, and more people use parks for different activities, park budgets—particularly operating budgets—become strained.
So what happens when park departments that were already experiencing constraints and aging infrastructure come face to face with a global pandemic?
In short: additional pressures, creative thinking, and a heightened focus on how we can plan together for more equitable park investments going forward.
For the second year, cities said Covid put pressure on already strained operations budgets—the money that funds work like cutting the grass. Budgets weren’t cut during the pandemic, but the additional public health-related tasks meant the same pot of money had to cover more things.
As Niall Lobley, Director of Parks and Cemeteries for the City of Kitchener said: park budgets have been “routinely stretched to the maximum extent possible—and have been even further stretched.”
“A “huge” amount of resources were invested during the pandemic into sanitation, extra staffing to monitor physical distancing and high use areas, litter pick-up, and mitigating damage done to natural areas from high use.”
Niall Lobley
In Regina, Parks Support Operations Coordinator Trevor Klein said staff worked hard to find room in existing budgets to launch programs like the winter cities program, which encouraged people to use parks during the colder months.
Klein also mentioned that service requests and expectations of park quality rose during the pandemic. People working from home had more time to visit local parks during the day, increasing their contact with parks staff while they were on the job. This led to an “increase in service requests and a higher level of expectation on [grass] cuts and trimmings and what facilities were available to residents,” Klein said.
At the same time, Klein said the department was dealing with reduced staff early in the pandemic due to a city directive to not hire additional casual staff in summer 2020. This meant training costs were higher when these staff were reintroduced in 2021. Indeed, 50% of cities noted that reduced staff was a challenge during the pandemic.
In Ottawa, city staff said Covid impacts started with “simple reductions to maintenance,” which was “in part to meet a departmental need to conserve funds as additional pressures were expected throughout 2020.”
These services were then adjusted to meet “changing needs,” which included a spike in waste collection costs that began in 2020 and continues today. City staff also said that some “parks operating funds were diverted to help compensate for Covid-related costs,” including portable washrooms and hand-washing stations.
It hasn’t been all bad, however. Some parks departments have been able to tap into Covid funding, particularly for active transportation projects such as trail enhancements or for local economic recovery through tourism funding.
While budgets on average have held steady during the pandemic, Kitchener’s Niall Lobley does worry about what future years hold as city governments begin to grapple with the budgetary fallout from high spending during the pandemic.
“I expect that we have some years where there is likely to be pain felt within tax-supported structures, whether that be at the municipal, provincial or federal level.”
“Traditionally speaking, those periods of payback can be quite hard on soft services like parks and recreation,” Lobley added. “We can see those suffering the more significant and earliest cuts in a time where we’ve seen very high levels of public spending that need to be recouped.”
It’s clear, however, that city residents want to see more, not less, investment: 87% of respondents to our survey of over 3,000 Canadian city residents said they wanted to see more public funding for parks. This included 36% who wanted to see more funding for maintenance and 35% for higher quality designs. Positioning parks as public health infrastructure and citing the rising importance of parks in the last two years for mental and physical health may be one way to ensure funding keeps pace.
In addition to being asked to do more with less, many cities also indicated that building and upgrading parks has become more expensive. In fact, 69% of cities said they had to delay capital projects due to Covid and 86% said cost increases were a challenge.
It’s difficult to attribute these rising costs solely to the pandemic, Lobley said, noting the trend had been in place before Covid. But the pandemic and recent supply chain challenges haven’t helped.
Lobley specifically mentioned playground costs, which have risen as much as 15% a year while “general infrastructure like benches, seats, picnic tables, and all those sorts of things are seeing cost increases as global supply chains are strained.”
Community expectations around park designs have also changed as park use increases, impacting the cost of design and construction.
“It’s not just a case of replacing a few pieces of playground equipment; these are much more comprehensive renewals of neighbourhoods parks.”
“I’m certainly foreseeing 2022 and beyond being very difficult in terms of bringing projects on time and on budget,” Lobley said.
Ottawa city staff also noted this long-term challenge, saying that, if sustained, rising costs may “reduce the number of renewal projects completed annually, or necessitate larger budgets for renewal to maintain existing service levels.”
In addition, staff said that, “extended lead times for parks materials have resulted in some project delays, but these longer lead times and cost increases are being built into our project planning process. Future projects may take longer to deliver, and may be more costly, but we will continue to adjust budgets and timelines based on market conditions.”
A key trend emerging from the pandemic has been a renewed focus on the already existing inequities in how parks are accessed and enjoyed. As parks were held up as critical places for mental health and community connection, it became harder not to notice how some neighbourhoods were greener than others.
Now, as cities begin to shift focus from immediate pandemic needs to longer-term planning, many are turning their energy towards new strategies that use equity-based metrics to guide park investment decisions for years to come.
The “single biggest focus and single biggest change in work focus” in Kitchener’s under-development Places and Spaces Strategy is the focus on equity-led investment, Lobley said.
“What I mean by that is making sure that we don’t just invest where the [development] money is, or invest where the new parks are being built, but that we are deliberately investing in areas which have been underserved in terms of park rehabilitations and new park developments. Our oldest parks are in communities that probably have the greatest need from a social perspective for those parks,” he said.
Consider the urban forest—a topic we explored in last year’s Canadian City Parks Report. Through city-wide mapping, Lobley said the city found some communities are over the city’s goal of 30% tree canopy, while some are sitting at less than half that level. “When we overlay two maps and see where we’ve got less canopy, these tend to be the equity-deserving communities—communities in high density developments, high population of rental apartments, lower socioeconomic status,” he said.
While Kitchener was already moving in this direction pre-pandemic, Lobley noted he “can’t help but think it’s at least partly influenced” by the pandemic, which put a heightened focus on equity.
The resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement and the Land Back Camp advocating Indigenous land rights in Kitchener, helped raise both awareness and put pressure on decision-makers to act, Lobley said.
“I would say that the social movements we’ve seen grow through Covid have really allowed us to move [the equity-led focus] forward with a greater sense of urgency.”
Other Canadian cities are moving on this as well. Vancouver and Toronto both released park plans with equity-focused metrics in recent years. Regina’s Trevor Klein noted that the city’s forthcoming 25 year parks and open space master plan will focus on the equitable distribution of parks—not just the green space, but facilities and amenities like picnic spots.
In Ottawa, city staff pointed to the city’s new park master plan, which uses the Ottawa Neighbourhood Equity Index, a resource created by the Social Planning Council of Ottawa, as a lens through which park investment priorities can be made. City staff also said this equity-based approach will be important in the city’s forthcoming Greenspace and Urban Forest Master Plan and in its Climate Resilience Strategy.
While the impacts of the pandemic will likely continue to be felt for years to come, this sharpened focus on equitable investment will help cities plan more resilient park systems for the future.
While municipalities offer multiple ways for residents to get involved in budgets through town halls, surveys, and other activities, it’s often unclear how community input influences final decisions. Proponents of participatory budgeting hope to change that by providing a direct route for residents to make funding decisions.
Toronto, Kitchener, and Longueuil have piloted participatory budgeting processes in the past. On the positive side, participatory budgeting was found to promote higher rates of participation than traditional park engagement, but it also raised concerns about the potential to foster a competitive atmosphere among community members.
How to devise a transparent, fair, and inclusive participatory budgeting process is something Isabelle Gaudette has thought a lot about. Gaudette is the Coordinator for Participatory Processes for the Centre d’écologie urbaine de Montréal, which worked with the City of Montreal to devise and run its $10-million participatory budgeting program in 2021.
The city received 620 submissions from the public, which were whittled down based on feasibility to a final 35 that people voted on in June 2021. Projects had to be between $500,000 and $3 million, take place on city property, and “contribute to Montreal’s ecological and social transition” by addressing climate change, biodiversity, equity, or sustainable resource consumption. Montreal is continuing the program, Gaudette said, setting aside a budget of $60 million over the next three years.
The voting age was set to those above 12 years old and the process also allowed non-citizens to vote–in fact, approximately a quarter of those who voted were youth and non-citizens, Gaudette said. Voter turn-out met the project team’s goal of 1% of the population. While that may seem small, she said, it represents 20,000 people directly voting on budget decisions that are usually left to a handful of elected officials and city staff.
Participatory budgeting also shows how the priorities of the public may differ from those of city officials, Gaudette said. The seven winning projects included mini forests, urban agriculture, green laneways, and more. But the second most voted on improvement was adding 125 water fountains and filling stations to parks in six boroughs.
“I don’t think that the professionals, the elected officials, would have said: “we are going to put drinking fountains in each park”. It seems basic, but that’s what people chose. It is a basic need.”
Isabelle Gaudette, Coordinator for Participatory Processes for the Centre d’écologie urbaine de Montréal
Gaudette’s advice for participatory budgeting:
Most Canadian cities offer a grant or matching fund program for residents who want to undertake public space projects, ranging from small events to larger infrastructure projects.
However, many of these grant programs were thrown into uncertainty when park amenities were closed or restricted due to Covid and public health guidelines discouraged gathering.
Recognizing this, the City of Waterloo introduced temporary changes to some of its community grants. This included more flexibility in how funds could be used (for example, buying personal protective equipment for volunteers), reducing matching fund requirements in recognition that volunteer hours may be more difficult to contribute, and encouraging projects that addressed public health, community well-being, and social isolation. Waterloo city staff said that these “changes were an important step to help remove barriers and to encourage unique and safe ways for the community to lead opportunities for connection.” Projects funded through the Neighbourhood Matching Fund included additional park seating, community message boards, and expanding community gardens. A mini-grant providing up to $300 also supported small-scale park events such as an ice cream social with rapid test pop-up.
In Hamilton, the city is testing a new approach with its Placemaking Grant pilot program. Made possible by a $100,000 donation by the Patrick J. McNally Charitable Foundation, Program Manager Sarah Ehmke said it specializes in “creative, temporary ways of activating public spaces.”
While conceived pre-Covid, Ehmke said the pandemic only made the program’s goals more relevant as people looked to engage in outdoor spaces. While the city only had funding for 10 to 12 projects, Ehmke spoke with 50 people proposing ideas. “A number of the proposals that we received…were directly in response to people’s experiences during Covid in public spaces,” she said.
One project in Hamilton Amateur Athletic Association Park included a local photographer who had taken photos (with permission) of people using the park in various ways during the pandemic. The grant funded a photo gallery in the park “to show the different ways people have been using the park during Covid,” Ehmke said. Photos showed dog walkers, kids playing, and people using park infrastructure as an outdoor gym.
To ensure projects were community- and equity-focused, the city encouraged applicants to propose projects in their own neighbourhoods and demonstrate partnerships to make sure the group had “considered the needs and wants and uses of public spaces beyond their own use.”
Ehmke’s advice for community grants:
While the federal government doesn’t have a long history of investing in city parks, two new funding initiatives have opened up new opportunities for collaboration.
National Urban Parks Program
While still in development, in 2021 the federal government announced a $130 million commitment over five years for Parks Canada to develop a National Urban Parks Program. This follows the federal government’s investment in 2012 to create the Greater Toronto Area’s Rouge National Urban Park.
“Urban parks represent the next evolution for Parks Canada, which has a long history of over 110 years of establishing national parks, national historic sites, and national marine conservation areas,” said Parks Canada Director of Urban Parks and Ecological Corridors Miriam Padolsky.
The new program, which the government views as part of its goal to conserve 25% of land and inland waters by 2025, will see Parks Canada work with governments, Indigenous partners, conservation organizations and other stakeholders to create or expand national urban parks in or near municipalities.
“National urban parks will offer a number of important benefits that align with Parks Canada priorities, including protecting biodiversity, contributing to climate resilience, connecting people with nature, and supporting reconciliation with Indigenous populations.”
Miriam Padolsky, Parks Canada Director of Urban Parks and Ecological Corridors
Healthy Communities Initiative
The Healthy Communities Initiative was a federally funded program with a unique structure that provided funding to community-based organizations to “create and adapt public spaces to respond to the new realities of COVID-19.” The $31-million program was managed by Community Foundations Canada (Park People was also a partner).
The program funded over 550 projects, but the demand was far greater. Over 6,000 applications were received, totalling $650 million in requested funding, showing how great a need there was–and is–for community-based public space funding.
Three quarters of the funding went to non-profits and charities, a point Community Foundations Canada emphasized in their final report: the initiative demonstrates “how small-scale innovations can have a big impact in communities to transform public spaces” and “how community-led infrastructure re-thinks social challenges and plays a critical role in providing innovative recovery solutions.”
The program included an equity guidance document prepared by Jay Pitter Placemaking for prospective grantees. This document has proven useful for other city-led granting programs as well, with the City of Hamilton referring grantees to the document in their Placemaking Grant pilot described earlier. When analyzing where grants went, Community Foundations Canada found that the communities most served by the initiative were “people experiencing low income or living in poverty, persons with disabilities, and newcomers.”
The full list of projects can be viewed on a map, but included initiatives by