Roadmap to Lower Taxes and Building a Fiscally Powerful Edmonton

Image of Downtown Edmonton

Every spring, Edmontonians open their mailbox and see the same thing: a property tax bill that feels heavier than it should. Around the kitchen table, families ask how they’re going to cover it. Business owners look at their margins and wonder how much longer they can hang on.

Every four years, municipal hopefuls show up with the same slogans: cut here, spend there, freeze taxes at zero, “find waste.” If those ideas worked, we wouldn’t be here. They’ve been tried again and again. Services erode. Infrastructure ages. And the bill in your mailbox still goes up.

The problem isn’t waste. It isn’t mismanagement. It isn’t even the tax rate on paper. The problem is structural. It’s the mill rate.

What is a mill rate?

1 mill is equal to $1 in property tax levied per $1,000 of a property's assessed value. So a mill rate of 7 means that you pay $7 for every $1,000 of your property's assessed value.

Cities calculate it based on their budget needs.

Total budget/ total property value in the city) x 100 =  mill rate. 

Hence why, the more properties there are, the lower the mill rate. 

Like every Albertan municipality, Edmonton only collects what it needs, not a penny more or less, to run the 70+ programs and services we rely on everyday. And it collects your property tax this way:

Property Tax = your assessed property value x Mill rate 

The Puzzle Nobody Talks About

Here’s the part that should stop people in their tracks.

Calgary and Edmonton each serve a metro population of about 1.6 million. But Calgary keeps almost 90% of that population inside its boundaries. Edmonton only keeps 70%. That missing 30% is nearly 400,000 people - a Saskatoon’s worth of neighbours - living just outside our city’s borders. They drive our roads, rely on our services, use our parks and amenities, but they don’t pay a dime into Edmonton’s tax base.

So Edmonton households are partially paying for services used by a population the size of Saskatoon on top of our own.

And it shows up in the math.

Calgary collects about $4.7 billion in operating revenue each year. Edmonton collects about $3.7 billion. We’re running on a billion dollars less. Over the past eight years, Edmonton’s average tax rate has actually been lower than Calgary’s. And yet, somehow, our bills are higher.

That’s because our municipal mill rate is nearly double Calgary’s — 7.6 compared to 3.8 in 2025. On a $400,000 home, that works out to about $4,025 in Edmonton versus $2,472 in Calgary.

Smaller budget. Lower rate. Bigger bill. That’s the broken structure we’re living under.

The Roadmap: One Plan, All at Once

For decades we’ve stumbled along with piecemeal strategies. A little greenfield plan here, a downtown plan there, an industrial plan. And that’s all well and good. We should have those plans.

But if we really want to lower the mill rate, we have to get more aligned and more assertive. We have to align every lever and move on them together: greenfield, downtown, and industrial, all at once, as hard and as fast as possible. That’s what makes this transformative.

And here’s the really incredible part. This plan costs us virtually nothing if done right. And any potential costs we want to incur to speed the process will be one in which we are completely made whole because rather than a grant or giveaway, these are in the form of no cost incentives or investments that see every penny returned to the public purse.

First: Smarter Greenfield That Pays Us Back

The common objection is that greenfield means sprawl, and sprawl never pays its way. That was true under the old rules. But today’s new neighbourhoods are built with far higher density requirements and that is likely to keep increasing. In fact, the City Plan policy was amended in June 2025 to incorporate greater density in greenfield development. This will bring more homes, more taxpayers, and more revenue per kilometre of road and pipe than older suburbs ever did.

The real barrier is that the first developer into a new area pays the full servicing cost. That risk slows everything down and pushes families into surrounding municipalities. If Edmonton front-loads or cost-shares on the servicing, the new neighbourhoods actually get built inside city limits. That keeps families here, adds supply to keep housing affordable, and spreads the mill rate across thousands of new properties. This also gives us a sensible entryway into cost sharing for new firehalls, police stations, and so on. 

Second: Downtown CRL Extension

I know outside of the core people are sick of hearing about downtown. It sounds like pouring money into a bottomless hole. But here’s the truth: right now dozens of empty lots are producing almost nothing. If we do nothing, they’ll keep sitting empty.

Pre-Covid, downtown provided about 10% of the property tax collected, offsetting everyone else’s bill. Now that is down to about 5%. That is unsustainable and dangerous.

The fix is to guarantee zero percent property tax increases on the base assessment (the base value of the land) for ten years. So we still collect property taxes but not on the increases that happen with development. 

That certainty is what banks need to finance construction. Towers rise. Cranes come back to the skyline. And once the incentive sunsets, the City collects millions in new annual taxes that wouldn’t have existed otherwise.

This is also included in the Downtown Action Plan’s Action 3, sub-action 3.7 which suggests to: Amend policies and regulations to reduce barriers, enabling the development of diverse housing options.

And the Downtown Student Housing Incentive, which passed on Aug. 19. 

To do this at scale, we need an extension of the Community Revitalization Levy. Without it, the turnaround is underpowered. With it, we unlock billions in private investment. And every new tower brings hundreds of residents downtown — making the streets safer, businesses busier, transit stronger, and restoring downtown’s tax contribution from today’s unsustainable five or six percent back toward twenty.

Third: Industrial/ Commercial Expansion With Certainty

The knee-jerk reaction is that industrial and commercial incentives are corporate giveaways. But look at Calgary: more than 22% of their budget is covered by industrial taxes. Edmonton’s is under 15%. That’s hundreds of millions of stable, long-term dollars we’re leaving on the table.

One of the ways the City is doing this is through the Industrial Investment Action Plan. The 9 actions listed in the plan are focused on attracting more investment to Edmonton and growing the industrial tax base. 

I believe the same zero-percent guarantee that will work for downtown towers can be applied with speed to major industrial projects. 

Each one brings millions in stable annual taxes and anchors clusters of suppliers and spinoffs. Every new major warehouse, factory, or high employment, high yield facility offsets what families pay and adds more employment. 

Industrial growth is the fastest way to lighten the load on households. This represents much needed employment for working families. Trades, union labor, support services and so on. This puts food on the table for our neighbours. Now!

The Payoff

Conventional wisdom says you can’t lower taxes without cutting services, that growth just adds more costs, that sprawl is always a Ponzi scheme, that downtown towers are giveaways and industrial incentives are welfare. And with the old approach, that’s all true.

But when these strategies are aligned and unleashed together, they reduce the mill rate itself. THAT’s what no one talks about. That’s the question that got lost in the current, ineffective approach.

Edmonton is on track to add an additional 230,000 people in just ten years, and that’s if we stay slow and steady at an average 2% growth rate. If those residents live inside city limits, that’s tens of thousands of new properties paying in. If we become more aggressive in inviting people here, now that we are actually prepared for rapid growth should it occur, that means even more properties within our city limits sharing the costs.

That allows us to drive the mill rate down by 20% to 30% over the next decade - enough to become absolutely competitive. And the ripple effects go further: tens of billions in private investment on the ultra conservative side, thousands of good-paying trade and union jobs in construction, and thousands afterward. Safer and more vibrant streets, and a reputation shift where Edmonton is seen not as a city struggling to catch up but as a city on the rise.

This isn’t just another policy idea. It’s a structural reset. A way for Edmonton to be the first city in Canada to lower taxes and grow prosperity at the same time.

Why Now

If we keep circling the same old debates, we will keep falling behind and your bill will keep climbing.

But if we act now – align, incentivize, and hit hard, then Edmonton can do what no other Canadian city has done: actually lower taxes through structural change, grow prosperity, build safety and vibrancy, and become one of the most competitive cities in Canada for new growth and new investment.

We don’t have to wait ten years to see the benefits. The construction will begin on new residential towers and conversion downtown, we will see more greenfield within our boundaries than without, in smart and strategic growth areas, we will see non-residential growth, and employment. The dollars from investment will be an injection to our local economy, and the energy of our city will grow as the towers rise.

The pieces were always here. What’s been missing is the vision.

This is the reset. And friends, it can’t wait.

Sidebar: What This Roadmap Could Deliver

Edmonton’s municipal mill rate in 2025 is 7.6254, nearly double Calgary’s 3.8706. The goal is to drive that down by 20 to 30 percent over the next decade. Every 200-unit downtown tower adds about $80 million in assessment and $600,000 in annual taxes once incentives end. Only ten new towers means nearly $800m in assessment and $6 million a year in new revenue. Imagine doubling that. Tripling it. 

Calgary’s industrial base contributes over twenty-two percent of their tax revenue. Edmonton’s is under fifteen. Closing that gap would mean hundreds of millions more each year in stable non-residential revenue. And with Edmonton’s population projected to grow steadily year after year through 2035 and beyond, capturing that growth inside Edmonton would add tens of thousands of new properties to our base — the potential equivalent of another city’s worth of taxpayers over the next decade.

Addendum: Taking the Pressure off Infill 

This roadmap also takes the pressure off infill. Infill was always meant to be a gentle, generational shift, adding density slowly, block by block, over decades. The recent population spike has forced infill into the spotlight in ways that could never be anticipated. By capturing growth through greenfield, downtown, and industrial expansion, we restore infill to its proper role: a steady, long-term evolution, not an emergency pressure valve.

And as the city grows, we’ll need to review multiple policies that were designed under very different conditions. Population growth at this scale, and the way it has actually played out in neighbourhoods, demands that we re-examine assumptions, measure outcomes in real-life circumstances, and adjust accordingly. A reset of the mill rate goes hand in hand with a reset of how we think about growth, balance, and long-term city-building.