What Residents Told Canmore About the Way Their Town Gets Built

In most towns, a document called the Land Use Bylaw is the kind of thing that lives in a filing cabinet and dies in a filing cabinet. It is the rulebook for development: what can be built where, how tall it can stand, how far it must sit from the property line, whether the corner lot can hold a duplex or a daycare. It is dense, technical and, in Canmore's case, more than 600 pages long, available only as a single PDF.

This year, the town asked its residents to read it anyway, and to say what they would change.

The results are now in. Over roughly a month this spring, the town collected more than 287 comments from residents, businesses and community groups, including 204 responses to an online survey, as part of a multi-year effort to throw out its aging rulebook and write a new one from scratch. A report summarizing that feedback, released July 9th, offers a detailed portrait of what people in Canmore want from the invisible machinery that governs how their town looks and grows.

The short version: They want it to be greener, clearer and more mindful of the people who actually live there year-round.

Why Canmore is rewriting a 600-page rulebook

Canmore’s land is scarce, expensive and hemmed in by wildlife corridors, floodplains and steep slopes. That makes the rules about how it gets used unusually consequential, and unusually contested.

The current bylaw dates to 2018, but town planners say it has accumulated years of piecemeal changes that left it bloated and inconsistent. An earlier phase of the project, documented in a 2025 "Issues Report," laid out the problems in blunt terms. More than half of the town's privately owned, developable land is governed by 43 custom-built "Direct Control" districts, one-off zoning arrangements that require negotiation, site-by-site analysis and public hearings. Some residential zones are near-duplicates of one another; the bylaw contains six versions of a single detached-home district that permit almost identical things. And roughly 40 percent of recent development applications needed at least one variance, a formal exception to the rules, with one project requiring eight.

To planners, all of that is a sign the rulebook no longer matches the town it governs. The rewrite, expected to run through 2028, is meant to produce something shorter, plainer and easier to use, ideally web-based and searchable rather than buried in a PDF.

What residents said

Several themes surfaced repeatedly, and near the top was sustainability.

Residents and industry professionals alike voiced strong support for making it easier to build energy-efficient, low-carbon homes, and for using the bylaw to encourage things like electric-vehicle charging, heat pumps and better accommodation for e-bikes. In the interest-holder workshop, sustainability drew more comments than any other topic. Participants argued that the current rules sometimes work against climate goals, penalizing thicker, better-insulated walls or effectively prohibiting air-source heat pumps in side yards.

That enthusiasm came with a notable caveat. When the survey asked whether the town should allow buildings to exceed height limits, residents drew a careful line. A majority were at least open to minor height increases tied to renewable energy or sustainable features such as solar panels. But when the same idea was framed as a reward for simply building to a green standard like LEED certification, 63 percent disagreed. The report's authors suggested the operative word was "minor"; residents seemed comfortable with small relaxations for concrete features, but wary of open-ended exceptions.

A second recurring theme was usability. Asked to rank ways to make the bylaw easier to use, respondents overwhelmingly favored two: writing in plain, direct language (84 percent called it a high priority) and using simple diagrams to explain complicated rules (nearly 83 percent). One workshop participant captured the confusion the current document can create, asking how "glamping" fit into a definition of campgrounds that was already vague. Notably, one proposed fix landed with a shrug: integrating artificial intelligence to answer simple zoning questions was the only option most respondents rated neutral or low priority.

Running underneath much of the feedback was a tension familiar to any resort town, the balance between tourism and everyday life. Participants pushed for rules that protect the livability of residential neighborhoods rather than "exclusively catering to tourist needs," in the report's phrasing. That surfaced most concretely around parking, the single most-mentioned topic at an in-person community night. Several residents supported scrapping minimum parking requirements for homes while requiring commercial tourist accommodations to provide or pay for their own, a reversal of who bears the cost.

Not everyone wanted change. Two residents wrote in to defend existing low-density zoning in their neighborhoods, citing worries about growth and capacity, and named the Larch and Eagle Terrace areas specifically. Concerns about density and growth were among the themes the town flagged as emerging from the feedback overall.

Who showed up

The people who participated skewed local and engaged. About 96 percent of survey respondents identified as Canmore residents, and they spanned a fairly even range of ages. More than 80 percent said they were at least somewhat familiar with the bylaw already, a self-selected, informed crowd rather than a random sample.

The in-person workshop drew 26 people from 19 organizations, a cross-section that included the local chamber of commerce, housing and tourism groups, architects and designers, cycling and transit advocates, environmental organizations and the public school district's transportation department.

Town officials were candid about the limits of the exercise. Public input, they noted repeatedly, is only one factor shaping the final bylaw, alongside council-approved plans and technical land-use analysis.

What happens next

The spring feedback closes out the first of several engagement phases. The town plans to use it to develop draft materials, including new zoning approaches, formatting and sample regulations, and bring those back to the public in the second half of 2026 for review. A drafting phase follows, with a final bylaw headed to council, and a required public hearing, in late 2027 or early 2028.

When people were asked what they most wanted to talk about next, their answers pointed the way: residential zoning, parking, sustainability and the broader question of what uses belong where. For a document most residents will never read cover to cover, the rewrite has drawn a striking amount of interest, perhaps because, in a valley where every buildable acre is spoken for, the fine print is never really fine print at all.

The Town of Canmore's What We Heard Report is available at mycanmore.ca/landusebylaw.