The massive Three Sisters development will bring much-needed housing to the mountain town. But will it turn Canmore into another Whistler?
It’s been a year since the Town of Canmore and a prominent developer laid down their swords.
Well, sort of.
But for the first time in over 30 years, the battle over the future of Three Sisters Mountain Village — a development that will double Canmore’s population in two decades’ time — was put to rest by Alberta courts, which decided the development had to go forward, regardless of the town’s wishes.
It shifted the lens in which the project was viewed by residents, washing away years of focus on environmental reports and complex matters of jurisdiction to a new era: one focused on how the Three Sisters fits into Canmore’s future. What kind of community will occupy the mountain town when it’s done in the mid-2040s? And alternatively, who won’t be living in Canmore when the time comes?
These lingering questions come as Canmore battles a cost-of-living crisis unlike many other Canadian towns and cities. “It is a major mountain to climb,” says Canmore Mayor Sean Krausert.
So far, the reviews from locals are mixed. Some Canmore residents believe the affordability crisis is already baked into the town’s future. Optimists, like Krausert, believe Three Sisters is one of Canmore’s last hopes. But even with fresh housing stock on the way, there’s concern from several corners that Canmore’s fate is sealed.
In any case, Canmore finds itself isolated, stuck between Banff with its need-to-reside clause that requires locals to have employment, and a general lack of development in Kananaskis Country. With such major development in its future, the debate hasn’t been settled: Will Canmore be another Whistler in 20 years’ time, or is there room for it to imagine another future?
‘A lot of people think it’s a done deal’
Today, the land Three Sisters Village will occupy is rather unsightly, even with the towering mountains sitting behind it. A river of rocks leads into an unkept pond of runoff water from the slopes. The substantial portion of surrounding land where a golf course once existed is clear of trees until it turns into forest, which climbs the mountain until reaching the alpine.
This piece of land, just 72 acres of the 417 developable acres that will be cultivated into new mountain homes over more than two decades, will be prepared for developers this fall and into next spring. It’s part of a sweeping development at the foot of the Three Sisters mountains that will massively expand the town’s population.
Once Three Sisters is built, Canmore’s town boundary will be tapped out for housing.
Residents have sparred with Three Sisters Mountain Village developers for decades over this piece of land. In the distance beyond the pond is a relatively small and flat body of forest, a corridor for wildlife such as grizzly bears, deer, wolves and other mammals in the Bow Valley. Though the developer’s plan to keep the corridor intact has been approved, local groups insist, with research in hand, that the development will be catastrophic for wildlife.
“This development, as approved, could very well put another nail in the coffin of the threatened grizzly bears,” says Tracey Henderson, a veterinarian and member of Bow Valley Engage, a group that has long opposed the development.
“That’s a punch in the gut to all of us who really feel it as our responsibility to grow the town in such a way that we actively encourage a coexistence with the wildlife in the valley.”
Canmore has been shackled by a decision made in 1992 by the Natural Resources Conservation Board (NRCB) which effectively approved the development in its prior form, then stewarded by Three Sisters Golf Inc. The complicated roads that led to last October’s decision by the Land and Property Rights Tribunal (LPRT), which forced the development to go ahead, largely trace back to that report. Residents against the development have said the report is outdated and have sought new environmental assessments. Alberta Environment rejected that request earlier this year. Bow Valley Engage and the Stoney Nakoda First Nation have sought a judicial review in an attempt to force a new environmental assessment, which is still winding its way through the courts.
But the issue was mostly settled last year in an emotional Oct. 23 council meeting in which councillors named in a lawsuit in front of the Court of King’s Bench recused themselves from it, while some remaining councillors choked back tears during their remarks, all before approving the development.
A year after the October 2023 decision, signs reading STOP TSMV still dot front lawns in Canmore. Henderson says the conversation has died over the past year: “A lot of people think it’s a done deal.”
Chris Ollenberger, director of strategy and development for Three Sisters Mountain Village Properties, believes there are two camps, one louder than the other. “There’ll be those that will be forever disappointed Three Sisters is moving forward, and there’ll be those that are very happy,” he says.
Three Sisters has tried to assuage those concerns, promising that wildlife fencing will surround the development. Construction on the fences is supposed to begin this fall, Ollenberger says. To discourage locals from galavanting through unmarked trails, routes will be created to ensure residents stay away from areas that could spook animals in the wildlife corridor.
The idea, Ollenberger says, is to keep wildlife “within the wildlife corridors and humans stay within the developed areas.”
Should the development go ahead as planned, an equally contentious issue is whether Three Sisters alleviates Canmore’s housing market, which turned red-hot over the pandemic.
When the development is complete in 20 years’ time or more, about 10 per cent of the units at Three Sisters will be sold at non-market rates. Krausert said the town will make sure those homes are also sold at least 10 per cent below market rates — though at current market rates, most homes would still be sold at $1 million or more. But because the development will be constructed over multiple decades, questions over its build-out are still dangling in the air.
“We’re not just trying for something quick and fast — get in, get out, or that type of thing,” Ollenberger said. “This is a long-haul project, and it needs to be done thoughtfully, and that’s our focus.”
Canmore’s cost-of-living calamity
Canmore’s affordability crisis isn’t new — but the scale and pace at which it’s ballooned over the past five years has turned the issue into a fully-fledged crisis.
Dean Smolicz has been wondering for several years where the town is headed.
When hiring new workers at Eclipse Coffee Roasters, the popular coffee shop he’s owned most of his nearly 16 years in Canmore, he does so under the condition they prove accommodations have been lined up. It’s not always a guarantee.
Smolicz has tried raising wages and offering better benefits. Even as many of his employees hold down evening jobs, many renters are at the whims of homeowners who sometimes choose to convert their homes to Airbnbs or sell them. The past five years — a period in which housing and rent prices flew off the chain, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic — have made it increasingly challenging to financially support his employees. As he says, “We only have a certain limit.”
“Even with increasing wages and offering benefits … the price of groceries, price of rent — employees are able to make it work, but it’s not easy,” he said.
It has only taken five years for Canmore’s rental rates to double. Average rent for in Canmore is currently $2,727 for a one-bedroom and $3,397 for a two-bed, according to the Job Resource Centre. In 2019, one-bedroom spaces were going for an average $1,422 and a two-bedroom for $1,767.
As of last November, the wage a worker needs to cover basic expenses in Canmore was a province-high $38.80, according to the Alberta Living Wage network. The second-most expensive municipality to live in was oil-rich Fort McMurray at $24.50.
The Town of Canmore has even built an affordability program, which provides discounts and offers to residents and families below a specific income threshold. Among those deals include free pet licensing and deals at local retail stores and on sports programming.
Its income thresholds are eye-watering. A family of four in Canmore earning less than $87,000 a year, for example, qualifies for the program designed for those experiencing the greatest affordability struggles. For those slightly less pinched, a four-person family earning less than $101,000 qualifies for the second tier of the program’s slightly smaller discounts and benefits.
As of early 2023, Canmore’s local food bank was providing hampers to four or five families or individuals a week. That number has swelled to an average 33 families a week and recently hit a high of 76 clients in a single week. Many of those people are coming from staff accommodations, said Cathy Hagan, executive director of the Bow Valley Food Bank.
“The cost of living here is so, so high that having a couple of kids — it pretty much exhausts both incomes by the time you pay for housing,” Hagan said.
Many fear this alone is eroding Canmore’s middle class, from its service industry workers to teachers. Ron Casey, who served as Canmore mayor for 11 years until 2012, is unsure where things are headed.
“If you’ve got a small-business owner, they’ve got every cent they have invested in their business, and then, where are they supposed to live? It’s going to get more difficult … for small businesses to start up.”
A housing paradox
Rather simplistically, Canmore has a built-in guarantee many small towns are clamouring for as they manage their own housing crises: greater housing stock. The Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation has identified that Canada will need millions more homes by decades’ end to restore affordability. Alberta’s supply gap is predicted to be less dramatic than other provinces.
But there’s a mix of optimism and cynicism over whether Three Sisters will help the town’s housing crisis. Mayor Krausert, for one, has bought into the notion that the development is Canmore’s only escape.
“If there was no more growth, we can basically kiss affordability goodbye,” Krausert said.
The town has also taken a meaningful crack at amending bylaws over Krausert’s first term to make it less appealing to own a recreational home. It recently moved to create a vacant-home tax as the number of tourist homes and short-term rentals boomed. Three Sisters would be partly exempt from those rules, as the developer’s area structure plan calls for 900 to 1,300 tourist homes to be built.
A recent report by Statistics Canada found 15 per cent of Canmore’s housing units were being used as short-term rental units, the third-highest in Canada behind Whistler and Mont-Tremblant.
The town has also created a Livability Task Force that has recommended incentivizing long-term residency and purpose-built rental homes. Limiting the growth of tourist homes was its first recommendation to council. However, many homes that are built with entry-level pricing are only sold at that price once, and then are left to market forces.
Casey, the former mayor, said Canmore’s housing troubles have not been for a lack of action on town council. “They can certainly work on some solutions, but one of the biggest problems we have is land. It’s not like we have more land we can expand into.”
One of the few tools at Canmore’s disposal is the non-profit, municipally-owned Canmore Community Housing (CCH), which develops purpose-built rental and for-sale units, often up to 40 per cent below market prices. A two-bedroom apartment at one of its developments, for example, goes for $1,725, almost half the town’s average rent. Many of its apartment condominiums and homes sell for around $300,000.
Kristopher Mathieu, executive director of CCH, endorses development of all types in Canmore — including Three Sisters — but has set expectations for what form of development Three Sisters will deliver.
“I think that the overlying nature of the Three Sisters development, as a whole, is not really to provide sustainable, below-market or affordable housing for the town of Canmore,” Mathieu says.
At the end of August, CCH’s waitlist hit 507 families and individuals, with an even split of renters and hopeful owners, he said. That’s approximately 300-per-cent growth from the prior year, he added. It’s currently waiting for construction to begin on a six-storey building on the side of the Trans-Canada Highway called Palliser Trail, which will have 144 rental units — the first of 10 phases on 17 acres of land CCH owns. It’s targeting creating about 750 below-market units over the next 10 to 12 years.
CCH is also working on smaller downtown infill sites, of which finer details still remain private, Mathieu said.
The Town of Canmore supports CCH developments by providing transfers to a pot called the Vital Homes program, which partly supports the agency’s financial viability. Revenue from the new vacant-home tax, Mathieu said, will hopefully provide more capital to the fund.
“We want to keep as many people here as we possibly can, because I’ve heard of many colleagues … that are unfortunately being squeezed out of the Canmore market just due to how expensive it is to own a home in Canmore, or even rent a home,” Mathieu said.
For Ollenberger’s part, he believes the years of hold-ups in court that prevented Three Sisters from moving forward has contributed to Canmore’s housing struggles. Even so, he wants to move past that period.
“It’s a point in time that is acutely painful. I get that, but I do think Three Sisters is part of the solution for that.”
Legal battles still simmering between town and developers
For all the recent harmony between Canmore town council and Three Sisters, another legal battle has brewed between the two parties, this time over a complex bylaw known as off-site levies. The taxes effectively determine how much developers are charged for building on new land — funds which are used to cover the cost of new public infrastructure in those areas, such as water pipes, new fire halls and utilities; if those costs were offloaded to the current residents, taxes would catapult.
Three Sisters Mountain Village Properties Ltd., along with five local developers, are currently appealing Canmore’s bylaw, arguing it doesn’t meet the requirements of the Municipal Government Act. The appeal is a wholesale challenge of Canmore’s bylaw, and will have province-wide implications should the group of developers win. (The case is once again in front of the LPRT.) The Rocky Mountain Outlook, the Bow Valley’s local paper, wrote in a recent editorial that the case has billions of dollars in future off-site levy deals on the line and “will have a clear and definitive precedent for decades to come when it comes to off-site levies in Alberta.”
Krausert declined to discuss the matter.
Then there’s the lawsuit being pursued by Three Sisters Mountain Village Property Ltd., who in 2021 sought $161 million in damages from the Town of Canmore, primarily over the town’s refusal to approve the development, and the cost of putting together previous area structure plans.
After Three Sisters’ approval last year, a minority owner bought space in the Rocky Mountain Outlook to issue a strongly worded letter warning residents of the “potential to severely impact the financial stability of the town and residents’ tax obligations,” and said he was troubled by locals who protested outside the home of the owners of Three Sisters. (Canmore collected about $74 million in revenue in 2023.)
“I would say the temperature has come down quite a bit for everybody on that,” Ollenberger said.
Now that Three Sisters’ area structure plans are going ahead, Ollenberger said the $161 million will likely be reassessed. “We have to address that number. We haven’t yet, but we are working on that internally.”
Across the spectrum, a large swath of Canmorites believe their town has fundamentally and permanently changed. Its roots as a mining town are long gone, and the community has more in common with Banff than Exshaw, the cement manufacturing town 15 minutes to the east.
That shift means Canmore, with its confined footprint, is no longer shaped by local housing market forces, said Ron Casey, the town’s former mayor. “In Canmore, the price of our property is based on, for lack of a better term, a global economy.
“It’s whatever anyone coming from anywhere in the world with money wants to pay.”
Casey still lives in Canmore in an old house on a plot of land that he believes is valued between one and one-and-a-half million dollars. He’s one of the few who haven’t renovated or torn down their homes to upsize their footprint and valuations. “The house would be considered a liability because nobody in this world would want to live in it. It’s not what people buying property here want,” he jokingly says of his home. On his block, fewer than half of the homes have their lights on year-round, he says.
Now retired, Casey works out of Canmore’s industrial region. Contractors he knows are constantly flipping through employees. He’s seen many with jobs and families in Canmore move downstream, so to speak, to Exshaw or Cochrane to seek affordable housing, as more people overflow from Banff into Canmore.
In his view, Canmore has hit a trajectory that’s irreversible, regardless of how many strictures it imposes on the housing market. Having moved to Canmore early in adulthood, he’s felt over more than two decades that he’s gone from being an outsider to one of the few originals.
“When the millionaires take over everything, well, then they’ll have to move over, because the billionaires will come in. And so this is just the way this happens,” he said.
“That’s the fate of these mountain towns, right? That’s just the way it is.”