Situated along the Trans-Canada Highway in southeast Alberta, Brooks lies roughly 186 km southeast of Calgary and about 110 km northwest of Medicine Hat. The city sits within the County of Newell at an elevation of 760 metres above sea level, and the Canadian Pacific Kansas City railway also passes through the area. The surrounding landscape is part of the Grassland Natural Region of Alberta, characterized by dry mixed grass and shortgrass prairie typical of the semi-arid region historically known as Palliser’s Triangle. Brooks experiences a semi-arid climate with cold, dry winters and relatively little snowfall compared to much of the rest of Canada, with Chinook winds providing occasional warming relief.
From Bison Grounds to Growing City
Long before settlers arrived, the land around Brooks served as a bison-hunting ground for the Blackfoot and Crow peoples. After Treaty 7 was signed in 1877, homesteaders began moving into the area under the Dominion Lands Act to take up farming. The community did not even have an official name until 1904, when a contest organized by the Postmaster General resulted in the area being named after Noel Edgell Brooks (1865-1926), a Canadian Pacific Railway Divisional Engineer based in Calgary. The settlement was incorporated as a village on July 14, 1910, and upgraded to town status just over a year later on September 8, 1911, when the population recorded in the census stood at 486. By the 1996 Census, the population had climbed to 10,093, making the community eligible for city status. Brooks officially became a city on September 1, 2005, at which point its population was recorded at 11,604. In 2010, the community marked the centennial of its original incorporation as a village.
Population, Diversity, and Community Identity
The 2021 Census recorded 14,924 residents living in Brooks, spread across a land area of 18.21 square kilometres, yielding a population density of approximately 819.5 people per square kilometre. That figure represented a 3.3% increase from the 2016 Census count of 14,451, which itself had grown 5.7% from the 2011 total of 13,676. Brooks is widely recognized for its cultural diversity. The city has been called The City of 100 Hellos, a nickname that grew out of a 2010 documentary by Brandy Yanchyk produced for Omni Television, which profiled the community’s significant immigrant, refugee, and temporary foreign worker populations. A separate 2007 National Film Board of Canada documentary, 24 Days in Brooks, directed by Dana Inkster, also examined this multicultural character. According to census data, Brooks has the highest proportion of Black Canadians of any census subdivision across the entire country.