Willoughby grew a city's worth of people and its community centre is still 'planned'
Fifty-three thousand people, a pool on paper, and two open houses. A push, not an attack, sourced from the Township's own documents.
Let us start with the Township’s own numbers, because they are remarkable.
The background report for the Willoughby Community Plan update, published in September 2025, puts Willoughby’s population at 53,659. It says the neighbourhood has grown almost tenfold since 2011 and now holds about 30 per cent of everyone in the Township. At full build-out, the same report expects somewhere between 87,438 and 106,941 people. For scale, the City of Langley, a whole separate municipality with its own mayor and council, describes itself as a place of around 35,000.
So Willoughby is already a mid-sized city that happens to be a neighbourhood. And its community centre is, in the Township’s own word, planned.
To be precise, because precision is the point: the Township’s project page says the Willoughby Community Centre is “presently planned to include” an aquatic centre with a 37.5-metre lap pool, a leisure pool and a hot pool, plus a fitness facility, a gymnasium, a library and multipurpose rooms. That is a good building. We would like to swim in it. The page lists two public open houses, one on May 23, 2024, and one on September 25, 2025, and says more information will be added as the project moves ahead. It gives no opening date, no budget and no address.
The background report itself says the quiet part plainly: the population now exceeds what the original plans expected, so additional facilities and upgrades are needed to keep the place liveable. We did not write that. The Township did.
None of this means nothing is happening. Willoughby Community Park and the Yorkson parks are real and busy. Walnut Grove Community Centre, W.C. Blair and Al Anderson pool exist and are a short drive away. The Langley Events Centre is right there, and the Township’s capital list is long. We also know how these things go: a pool is the most expensive building a municipality builds, and councils of every stripe push them to the next budget. Our concern is not that anyone is lazy. It is that “planned” has been the status while tens of thousands of people moved in around the sign.
Here is the test we would apply. If a family moves into a Willoughby townhouse this fall with a six-year-old, will that child learn to swim in Willoughby before they finish elementary school? Right now, nobody can answer that question, because there is no date to answer it with.
What would fix it
A date. Not a ribbon-cutting, just a published schedule with the usual caveats: when design is expected to finish, when a budget goes to council, when a shovel might go in. Every other big project on the Township’s list has a page with a status on it. This one deserves the same, and residents deserve to be able to hold the schedule up at budget time and ask how it is going. A second thing that would help: a progress line in the Township newsletter whenever the status changes, so people are not learning about their own pool from an open house they missed.
Where to act
The Township’s Willoughby Community Centre page is the official source, and the place to watch for the next open house. Budget consultations and council agendas are where a date would first appear; the Township’s capital projects page lists what is funded. We keep a plain-English version, including what is already open nearby, on our Willoughby Community Centre page, and we will update it the day a date is published.