Airdrie mayor talks accommodation tax, living wage

Heather Spearman on Alberta Primetime Dec 19, 2025

Airdrie Mayor Heather Spearman joins Alberta Primetime host Michael Higgins to discuss a proposal for a hotel and short-term accommodation tax, the reality of the living wage in Airdrie, and more in this year-end interview.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Michael Higgins: Your accommodation tax pitch was your first real foray onto the provincial stage as a new mayor.

How hard did you have to sell it to other municipal leaders?

Heather Spearman: Not very hard. We passed that resolution with roughly 74-75 per cent at the resolutions table, which is a pretty good number. I think everybody in Alberta who’s experiencing this unprecedented growth is looking for ways to support their own residential tax base and their commercial tax base in their own communities. When we have folks coming to our communities, it’s nice to be able to look at potential solutions that can help support the infrastructure we need, that often supports their visits.

MH: What does the need for those dollars ultimately speak to?

HS: It’s a variety of things. For Airdrie specifically, we are such a young community. A lot of the events we host here happen to be youth sporting events. When we’re talking about a municipal accommodations tax, when we have folks coming from all over the province, or from western Canada or maybe from the northern United States, they’re coming here for those sort of events.

Not so long ago, there was the Ring of Fire Ringette tournament for girls and young women that was hosted here in Airdrie. Our hotels were beyond full, and hotels in the surrounding communities were also full. It’s a very small addition to the bill for those staying here, but ultimately adds up to quite a bit. For Airdrie we could see as much as $800,000 a year in additional revenue - which is not nothing when you are one of the fastest growing cities in western Canada.

MH: Like many councils, yours dove right in on the 2026 budget and ended up approving a 4.6 per cent tax increase.

How challenging was it to land on that figure, and what does it mean for the future of the city?

HS: I think there’s a misconception from a lot of folks that when we’re talking percentages in terms of tax adjustments, it’s different for every community. 4.6 per cent in Airdrie is very different from 4.6 per cent in Grande Prairie or Medicine Hat or Calgary. We really try to boil it down to what does it look like on an annual or a monthly increase for folks?

It was interesting, because we have a mostly new council. Obviously, I’m the first new mayor in 15 years in Airdrie. I had some responsibilities at the table, and one of those major responsibilities was to work with my fellow incumbents and with my administrative colleagues to bring the new council members up to speed. They were essentially sworn in at the end of October and had a couple weeks to learn everything. Then they had to dive right into a $500 million budget, which is our biggest budget in the history of Airdrie.

It was curious, because when the budget went public it was presented as a 6.6 per cent tax adjustment, but it wasn’t accounting for about two per cent of other increases we could potentially add, whether that was library supports, housing supports, or some other things, such as policing and whatnot. We actually were looking more truthfully at an eight to nine per cent tax adjustment for our residents and businesses. So we had some aggressive work to do.

We are very fortunate. We have an excellent finance team here at the City of Airdrie and they worked very hard to make sure any extra money we had over the year was invested very, very prudently. We had some really great investments come back to us this year. Even though the financial year is not quite finished, we had already seen well over $5 million in a surplus because of those investments. We used that to offset some one time costs, which allowed for a few less trade-offs in terms of some of the things we wanted to shave down in the budget. That allowed us to get to that 4.6 per cent number. We’re quite proud of that and I’m happy to say that we unanimously voted that forward.

MH: A recent report from the Alberta Living Wage Network put Airdrie right near the top of the pile in the province at $29 an hour – second only to Jasper.

Why so high, and how do you approach that as mayor and council?

HS: I’m so glad you brought that up. There are a couple of things about the living wage that is really important for folks in Alberta to understand. This is a volunteer program. Not every single municipality participates in this data review, but Airdrie does. The main reason being because we need and prefer to work from a data set that’s as fresh and accurate as possible. Whether we are doing our annual census or whether we’re doing the Living Wage Assessment, it’s really important to us anytime we’re advocating to third parties such as other levels of government, we have those accurate numbers.

The interesting thing about the living wage calculations is it’s a very specific formula that takes into account multiple things, one of which is a particular interesting spot for Airdrie, because we’re such a young and very family focused community. We have something called purpose-built rentals. We see those in every single community, but in Airdrie in particular we have an issue with the availability of three-bedroom purpose-built units. Because of that, it affected the formula quite heavily. It makes it seem like it’s more difficult to get a three-bedroom unit, and the cost for a three-bedroom unit at the rental rates is significantly higher than you’ll see in some other communities. But it doesn’t necessarily mean that Airdrie as a whole is unaffordable or requires a significantly higher living wage to live in, especially if you are a single person, or you’re a couple or just don’t necessarily need something from the rental market.

Another consideration there, because it’s obviously all around the cost of living, is a lot of folks commute. Because of that commute there’s insurance, there’s fuel, there’s all those transportation costs. Transportation is actually calculated in that formula as well. So when we look at the city of Airdrie specifically, are we truly requiring that kind of living wage based on comparables to other municipalities? Number one, not all the municipalities in the province actually participate. I suspect that if all of them had to, we’d probably land somewhere in the middle. The second thing being, if we’re not factoring in those three-bedroom rentals we would also probably land somewhere in the middle.

MH: Many Albertans may recognize your last time with your father Chris Spearman being the former mayor of Lethbridge.

How does that play into your political dynamic and your motivation for running as mayor?

HS: It’s been really, really fortunate. My dad and I don’t always have the same politics, and I think most people are pretty aware of that at this point. We don’t have the same politics, necessarily. But what I do really appreciate is at a very young age, one of my earliest memories was barely being able to reach the windshield wipers of a vehicle, but putting his pamphlets under there while he was running for a school division.

I have had the pleasure of understanding at the dinner table what’s going on in my world and how my voice affects it. I have never missed an election, whether it was a school election or one I was actually legal to vote in. Even from a campaigning standpoint, I have always supported my dad in his campaigns, and he has certainly always supported me in mine. A fun fact I really love is in October of 2021 was the night he retired from his mayorship, and that was the night I was first elected to municipal politics. Not only that, now that I’ve been elected mayor, he was the mayor who took Lethbridge into 100 thousand for a population. And I will be the mayor that takes Airdrie through 100,000.