Courtney Walcott on Inclusivity, the Arts and Calgary’s Future

Calgary’s 2021 municipal election is on its way and so is change – that is, if we unite with a resolve and tenacity to see it through. I sat down with community organizer, high school teacher and City Council candidate Courtney Walcott to discuss his outcomes-based approach to systemic change and vision for Ward 8, as well as Calgary’s growth into a city where choice, equity and safety are imperative.

Walcott’s Work Leading up to Running for City Councillor

Courtney Walcott is an English and social studies teacher at Western Canada High School. Five years ago, he became an Anti-Racism Equity Facilitator for the Calgary Board of Education (CBE). In this role, beginning at the school level, he created an Equity and Inclusivity committee to deal with particular discriminatory incidents the school system was unequipped to handle. Walcott also implemented a Black History Month celebration, one of many efforts to address inclusivity at Western. 

Walcott also began the conversation of diversity and representation on the curriculum level. “As a new teacher in the province, your first couple of years are trying to get to know the curriculum,” says Walcott. “Once you feel safe in that, then you can actually start to criticize it. It's challenging to do when you're a new teacher, because you're just trying to tread water. But once you get your footing, you start to realize the gaps, and that's when you can really start to approach them.”

Pushing the conversation forward led to Walcott teaching equity and inclusivity on a provincial level, offering trainings in partnership with the Alberta Teachers Association as a Canadian Cultural Mosaic Foundation volunteer. In this role, Walcott shared insights with fellow Albertan educators on the impact of racism as well as systemic and interpersonal discrimination. 

Seeking more change, Walcott petitioned the CBE to lead an anti-racism task force and launch an investigation into the data. Up for scrutiny were course development, teacher training, human resource’s responsiveness, curriculum, and demographics among different levels of courses (such as applied streams, ‘dash one’ and ‘dash two’). Walcott was especially interested in the demographics in order to evaluate where students were being streamed, and how the intersections of various identities such as gender, race and sexuality, influenced their path within the system. “They started a version of a task force that went nowhere,” says Walcott. “So that's still a fight that needs to keep going.”

After that, Walcott turned to front-facing municipal engagement, becoming one of the core organizers of Defund2Fund, a coalition of local organizations and individuals invested in equity-seeking work. In 2020, these organizations gathered to discuss the municipal budget with the goal of re-imagining fund allocation –presenting a proposal to the City that would use funds to tackle harm reduction, the decriminalization of minor offenses, affordable housing, and increasing support systems in order to “move toward a place where we don't need the CPS as much as we do now,” Walcott says. 

This work ended up in the creation of the Community Safety Investment Framework –  an initial $8 million fund, courtesy of the City, doubled by the Calgary Police Service. “And then after that is when we decided to run for – I decided to run for Council, so that there is a representative at the table to keep this work going,” he says. “Because I was kind of tired of yelling across the aisle at someone to do the work for me.”

Ward 8’s Pressing Issues

Ward 8 is diverse, with extremes of affluence and poverty within the same Ward. Despite these differences, development and community building are common priorities. Walcott says explaining the economic, environmental and social reasons for building closer knit communities to potential constituents has been a challenge. Urban sprawl, for example, leads to decreased inner-city investment and higher property taxes. 

“Every time we build a new community, instead of reinvesting in a current community, you just hollow out your services in the inner-city,” says Walcott. “Anytime you get rid of amenities or community rec centers or street infrastructure…you're gonna see crime rates go up…the detrimental impact of these things cannot be understated.”

However, to address this particular issue, it’s important to understand it’s roots. “It’s kind of a – to be honest, a little bit of a Western culture [thing], right? Western Canada is all about homesteading. It's all about coming here so you can carve out a piece of land that's just yours. And that's embedded in who Albertans are. And I think that's now the problem, we've hit that wall where millions of people have come here, and millions of people in Alberta are trying to find their own piece of land,” Walcott says. 

A system that values human dignity prioritizes choice; this applies to housing – a top priority for Walcott. “Anyone who's ever shopped to buy or rent a place knows that we often move where we can afford. So if we're going to really build an inclusive city, then there should be affordable options in every single neighborhood, so that you can actually choose a place to live instead of just going through whatever options are available,” Walcott says. 

Among other issues, Walcott cites transportation, the opioid crisis, vacancy rates in the downtown core, and the climate crisis. “Transit, housing, our downtown, our economic stability, all of these things are related to the climate crisis. If we do it all well, we will be addressing that issue and every single one,” he says.

Investing in Calgary’s Arts and Culture Industries

The arts budget is marginal compared to other sectors, and is often used as a scapegoat to avoid inclusive, sustainable change. “Arts and anti-racism work are a part of economic development,” Walcott says. “The data has been available for a very long time. It's taken me years to put it all together, but nonetheless, it is out there. I have it.” 

The arts have both personal and economic value. “It allows you to invest in yourself emotionally, physically. It allows you to step out of the everyday race to actually just be reminded that we are human beings that need to embrace and tap into our emotional side,” he says. “And that's what the arts is. Not only does it give people a fundamental escape, but it's necessary to the culture of a city. And where you create culture – to be honest – businesses thrive, right? If you create opportunities for different diverse groups of people to succeed, and that includes performing arts and that includes a robust drama section in our city – an art section and creative sector – you allow for people from diverse backgrounds to find themselves in your space, in Calgary as a city.”

“In doing that, it's about talent. When you allow diverse people to succeed, you create a talent base that is huge, when you're looking at the economic standpoint of the rest of the city. Whether it's small businesses, whether it is large corporations seeking a new place to call home, robust culture: that's where most people want to be. You want to go to where the people are, you don't try and go to a place where you have to carve out a corner and attract people to you. You want to go to a place where people already love being. And for a city like Calgary, as we go through a dynamic cultural shift, arguably away from things like Stampede toward a different form of culture, a different anchor point for us, then that's the sector it's going to come from first.”

Why shift away from such a cultural staple? Walcott says, “Stampede represents a great part of Calgary and Alberta's history. However, the demographics of Calgary have shifted greatly and continue to do so. If we are going to embody the realities of a diverse city, we need to embrace, alongside the Stampede, cultural events that reflect the changing nature of our city and world.” 

Revitalizing the arts and culture industry calls for us to consider the artists we engage, our level of investment in affordable spaces for artists to explore their art, as well as creating venues and festivals for Calgarians to engage in the public sphere. “And all that lands on the city because, again, you want to bring back the economy? Well, any new investment is gonna go to a city where people are, and people are drawn to life, and that life comes from the arts quite often,” he says.

The Reality of Equity-Seeking Work

Equity-seeking work is a mutually beneficial endeavor that requires patience and “exceptional growing pains,” Walcott says. “And so much of the work that we're proposing, they're all delayed returns on investment. Anti-racism work – you're not gonna see that benefit now. You're gonna see that benefit years from now, when you're not dealing with issues within the CPS, you're not dealing with issues within the city, you're having a more diverse hiring staff because people grew up in that system,” he says.

A delayed return on investment requires solidarity. “Let's say I sit on Council for eight years, and I do this work every year for eight years, I will likely not see the fruits of my labor for 20 years,” Walcott says. “And of course, that requires the next counselor who sits in that seat to keep the work going. Because we are doing restorative work here, right? That's what this is, it's restorative work, we're trying to fix things that are broken by design or just through failures of the system,” he says.

Dismantling systemic discrimination is multi-generational work. “It was the life that I chose as a teacher,” Walcott says. “You always have to come to this with an understanding that whoever starts this work will likely never see it finished. So you have to be comfortable in the fact that you're just setting a strong foundation for someone else to stand up on.” And finding the right people to keep the work going has been a challenge. “The absolute truth is anytime anybody does this degree of advocacy, it does come at great personal cost,” he says. 

A Shift in Perspective From Early 'Missteps’

Walcott discusses mistakes along his early equity-seeking journey – like teaching people how to be unbiased. “That's not a thing,” he says. “You can teach people to unpack their bias, sure, but you can't – it's a very important work, but it doesn't lead to the change that I think people expect it to.”

When we want change, we want it now. 

But, Walcott’s vision is grounded.

Contrary to what you would expect of a politician on a campaign trail, he doesn’t promise immediate change – a sober grasp on our current socio-political and cultural climate. Systemic issues won’t be addressed with the stroke of a magic wand. “So when you're looking at an outcomes based analysis of systems change, especially with regards to discrimination, or just really any kind of discrimination, sexism, racism, income discrimination, etc., focus on the data, because the data will lead you to the parts of the system that are failing,” he says, using eviction rates among women and people of colour as an example. 

Walcott explains: “What is happening in which people of color are finding themselves in such tight economic times that affordable housing is no longer affordable? So you can start reading into the data of who's first to get cut in certain industries and so on. What levels of jobs are they having? What levels of education exist within communities of color, and communities of diverse backgrounds, marginalized communities in general? There's your data points. It's not me sitting here saying, ‘Well, someone in that office is racist!’ It's actually the opposite. I bet you someone in that office doesn't even realize what they're doing. They're probably just looking at who hasn't paid their bills, and evicting them. So it's my job to look past that. Being like, ‘Hey, of the 500 people you evicted, 400 people happen to be women and young mothers. How is it possible that you have an even distribution of men and women in your affordable housing that only the women are being evicted?’”

Systems or outcome based thinking provides empirical data that can be evaluated for comparison down the line. “Because then, five years from now, I go back and I look at the same eviction data. And if it's the same, then all the reforms that I've tried have failed. But if it's different, or at least trending in the right direction, then all of a sudden, it tells you that effective change is there,” he says.


To learn more about Courtney Walcott’s campaign visit courtneywalcott.com. For more information on voting in the upcoming municipal election visit calgary.ca/election.html.