Let’s try to figure this out:
On July 29, Calgary’s $6.3-billion Green Line light rail transit extension project was worthwhile enough for Alberta Transportation Minister Devin Dreeshen to assure Calgary Mayor Jyoti Gondek in a letter that the promised $1.53-billion grant from the province “will not be reduced or pro-rated” as long as the project met agreed upon conditions.
On Aug. 1, Mr. Dreeshen told CBC Calgary’s The Homestretch radio program that his $1.53-billion promise to help fund the largest infrastructure project in the city’s history was “100-per-cent” secure.
“I’ve been working closely with the mayor and Calgary city councillors so that they know that the commitment from the province for the Green Line [is] in place and that they can bank on it,” he told the broadcaster.
Thirty-six days later, the day before yesterday, Mr. Dreeshen wrote another letter to Mayor Gondek. This time he said the United Conservative Government wouldn’t be keeping its promise after all, despite the fact city taxpayers had already sunk $1.5 billion into the project on the strength of it.
“The Green Line is fast becoming a multibillion-dollar boondoggle that will serve very few Calgarians,” Mr. Dreeshen’s latest letter huffed.
And the minister’s excuse for this screeching reversal?
He claimed to have had his railroad-to-Damascus moment only after reading city’s Aug. 15 business case, which thanks to the provincial funding delay had proposed proceeding with a scaled down first stage of the project. “I have serious concerns with the major reduction in proposed benefits for the Green Line for Calgarians,” the letter said.
It went on: “… Although we understand that hundreds of millions have already been spent on utility and other work for the current Green Line scope, throwing good money after bad is simply not an option for our government.”
Is this excuse credible?
Not really.
If the Green Line was really turning into a boondoggle, or the plan amounted to a “line to nowhere” as critics allied to the UCP alleged, that would have been obvious long before Aug. 15. Clearly the city’s business case was nothing more than a convenient fig leaf for the minister.
It’s been obvious for a while Danielle Smith’s UCP Government wasn’t particularly enthusiastic about the Green Line – if nothing else, too many of its friends and generous donors in the Calgary Sprawl Cabal despised it on general principles.
The government had already failed to deliver on the pledged funds in 2021. But the project was nevertheless approved on July 7 that year after meetings in Calgary between Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who came bearing federal dough, and then-mayor Naheed Nenshi, who had already announced he didn’t plan to seek re-election.
The PM met separately the same day with then-premier Jason Kenney. “We know Conservatives are always a little less enthused about public transit projects,” Mr. Trudeau said in an interview three days later, “but the money is there and the agreements are signed, so regardless of an election, this Green Line is going to go forward.”
So what really changed? We’ll never be told the truth by the UCP, of course, but it’s pretty easy to speculate with confidence why Mr. Dreeshen tossed a spanner in the works.
Back on June 22, Mr. Nenshi was elected leader of the Opposition NDP on the strength of party members’ belief he had the formula needed to beat the UCP, especially if the governing party is led into another election by his old debating club challenger Ms. Smith.
By this week, obviously, it had sunk in at the Premier’s Office that Mr. Nenshi really is a threat. Maybe they’ve seen some new polls. This would certainly account for the gratuitous attack on the former mayor in Mr. Dreeshen’s letter.
“We recognize your and the current Council’s efforts to try and salvage the untenable position you’ve been placed in by the former Mayor and his utter failure to competently oversee the planning, design and implementation of a cost-effective transit plan that could have served hundreds of thousands of Calgarians,” Mr. Dreeshen told Ms. Gondek, shedding a few crocodile tears.
Funnily though, just weeks ago when those old pipes in Calgary broke, the UCP cheering section was saying almost exactly the same things about Mayor Gondek.
As the dust settled yesterday, it sounded very much as if Ms. Gondek were throwing in the towel. The Canadian Press reported that as a result of the province’s broken promise, she had said the city could no longer afford the project.
But if Mr. Dreeshen’s intemperate letter is any guide, the UCP will continue its attack on Mr. Nenshi, and if public services in Calgary are collateral damage, so be it. After all, the UCP has repeatedly proved itself incapable of governing, and picks fights to give the impression it’s in charge.
It’s had a famous war on doctors, which didn’t end particularly well. It’s in the middle of a war on Alberta Health Services, and is taking some heat for the appalling state of health care on its watch. So why not start a war with Calgary too? It’s not as if Ms. Smith likes urban voters. She’s already made that quite clear.
As Mr. Nenshi put it cleverly about the premier and her party at the start his campaign to lead the NDP: “All they do is pick fights and waste money.”
Now they’re doing both with a vengeance and trying to blame Mr. Nenshi.
Will it work in Calgary? Too soon to say.
It never is the UCP’s fault. They have to blame someone else. Desperation is kicking in, so Danielle Smith and the UCP have to find some type of detractor, because her leadership review is forthcoming.
Devin Dreeshen and the UCP have other interests.
https://albertapolitics.ca/2024/05/high-speed-rail-in-alberta-still-a-terrible-idea-that-wont-go-away/
Even North Haverbrook has one, come on Springfielders, er’ ah Albertans.
Well I suppose to be fair, in this case the UCP is mostly picking fights. But if this leads to further delays in Calgary’s LRT construction and more additional costs they may cause more money to be wasted too.
The UCP’s dithering about this project is epic. It started with former UCP leader Kenney enthusiatically pushing for it when he was a Federal Minister. Back then I believe it was to be partly funded by Alberta’s carbon tax. But of course Kenney got rid of that when he switched to provincial politics and became Premier. He was less enthusiastic when it was no longer funded. Then the Feds forced his hand and it was eventually somehow amazingly funded again.
But this complicated on again off again funding led to delays and cost increases. Calgary mayors have been persistent but patient throughout all the provincial waffling. Just when it seemed to be finally going ahead, the UCP and Smith have again pulled the rug out from under it yet again.
The problem is not any mayor of Calgary, but provincial dithering. At least they haven’t tried to blame Nenshi yet for all the recent problems with the water pipes. But weren’t they installed around the time Klein was mayor?
Oh, yes, Nenshi has indeed been blamed by some for the water feeder main that was installed in 1975 during Rod Sykes’ term as mayor. Who needs logic and facts in Alberta? Nenshi was a toddler at the time. Maybe at some point he watched the Buck Shot Show, RIP. I sure did enjoy watching Rodney the Rodent on the Buck Shot Show.
The Smith government has no problem giving hundreds of millions of dollars to a billionaire to build a new rink for the Flames, but can’t find any money for public transit. Sounds about right.
I guess Ms Smith has abandoned that dream of doubling Alberta’s population. It could be done, but only with massive investment in transportation, hospitals, schools and infrastructure. On second thought, she would rather stay small.
Simon: I’m quite sure that Ms. Smith is capable of thinking two entirely contradictory thoughts at the same time. DJC
There is a clinical name for Smith’s affliction with contradictory thoughts.
Only two contradictory thoughts? Really? I think you are being too kind David.
I propose a new collective name for Alberta voters: Homers. They never learn a thing.
D’oh!!!
You can’t teach a Sneech.
Thanks for writing this, David.
Devin Dreeshen has struck me as someone in over his head for some time. At the beginning of COVID he posted on Twitter how he had spent an hour (via video) assuring workers at a meat packing plant that it was safe for them to go to work, just before the plant had to be shut down because it wasn’t.
Then, of course, there was the infamous ‘shields up’ fiasco, where Dreeshen’s office became a party room.
Now Dreeshen couldn’t resist the temptation to needlessly insert the phrase ‘former Mayor and his utter failure to competently…’ in his letter to Calgary Mayor Jyoti Gondek announcing the cancellation of provincial funding for the Green Line. As a result, he leaves himself open to the accusation (that you have made) that the whole thing was politically motivated to cast aspersions on Naheed Nenshi.
The whole thing reminds me of the election ads the CPC ran prior to the 2015 election, in which they suggested that Justin Trudeau is just not ready. Dreeshen certainly is not.
He’s most definitely in over his head. It’s all due to shear immaturity. Hell, he even looks like he’s 16 years old. How this guy is in government I’ll never understand – I wouldn’t even trust Dreeshen to run the shoe counter at a local bowling alley.
He’s aged considerably since our host took that picture. Probably something to do with what happens in his office after the cries of “Shields Up!”
There is a very shiny office tower in Cowtown, spanning from 8th to 9th avenues, which houses (housed?) a few shops at ground level and the first floor.
Now if you take an escalator down instead of up, you’ll reach a fitness facility for employees only. Ah, Sherlock, but is what you see truly just a sweatshop for the oil, gas and finance crowd? Hmmmm.
For behind this facade lurks the skeletal remains of a station, an underground station for an ancient electric train system. No one knows how old exactly but “experts” feel it was shut in by paleo-conservatives in the era of Lougheed the First. Fact or fiction, it’s a good tale to keep the kids very afraid this Hallowe’en.
There is a relic of the iron horse era waiting to be used under a shiny building with a statue of a actual horses outside. I saw the blueprints once, long ago, and it was verified by my reliable source, who worked in that building in a professional capacity. I can’t remember names, so don’t ask.
Interesting that the only person copied on Dreeshen’s letter is Rob Anderson in the Premier’s Office.
This is a starkly different decision than the Ford government taking over responsibility of the Ontario Line from the City of Toronto. In exchange, Toronto is getting a faster, higher capacity subway line rather than the light rail line the City had previously proposed because it was all they could afford. If the Green Line goes ahead at all with the UCP in charge, Calgary will end up with a street level design vastly inferior to what is currently being built.
John: Interestingly, and I admit I don’t fully understand the basis of the objection, the UCP crowd in particular seems to object to the idea of putting the downtown portions of the Green Line underground. What’s with that? Speaking of Toronto, didn’t the late Rob Ford say “The war on the car must end” and advocate putting transit lines below street level? it’s all most as if the Conservatives object to whatever the other guys are trying to do – or, perhaps more to the point, to public transit, period. Their motto: Let the poor walk! And by poor, presumably, they mean anyone in Calgary who doesn’t live in Mount Royal. DJC
It is all about selling gasoline and the cars that use it. Even an urban “bicycle master-plan” is not too trivial for the fuel dealers to overlook sabotaging. Then design your cities so each half of the population commutes with their one and a half tons of gasoline fueled metal to the other side of the city. Have the little Prince in Ottawa ban low cost Chinese electric cars while our own Queen bans renewable generation and storage here. The poor are just collateral damage without even sidewalks to walk on in most areas.
Let’s see. The UCP introduced legislation preventing municipalities from taking federal money without washing it through the UCP money machine first. Then the UCP decided not to help the City of Calgary financially when its aging water infrastructure failed. Then when the second set of repairs had begun, and the citizens of Calgary were banned from outdoor water use, flushing toilets according to “if it’s yellow, let it mellow, if it’s brown, flush it down”, the UCP decided that a quarter of the city’s 1.4M people could do without the LRT, because they live “nowhere”.
Let’s do the math: that’s about 350,000 people of little consequence to the UCP. Some of those people live in Calgary-Hays, currently represented by “Mr. Invisible” Ric McIver. He is the former Minister of Municipal Affairs, Minister of Transportation and Economic Corridors, Minister of Infrastructure and Minister of Transportation and Economic Corridors. Surely he knows that the people in his constituency are real and that they live somewhere because they give him his safe seat every time an election rolls around. They also gave him some feedback about traffic and roads when he hinted about making provincial highways toll roads. This is because the people in Calgary-Hays have very few choices of roads to get out of their communities, one of which is a provincial highway, Deerfoot Trail. At the time, due to a lack of schools in their communities, many realized they’d pay multiply tolls per day, as other routes were congested and under construction, and children have to go to school and back, and to tutors and activities, while parents themselves have to drive to work. Such a lack of services all round!
But I digress. The citizens of Calgary and Calgary-Hays surely do know the difference between the stuff that can mellow and the stuff that needs to be flushed down, after a long summer of careful attention to detail. They see this for what it is. The 2023 election campaign might have been the first time that Ric McIver ever had to knock on doors in his black “UCP Caucus” windbreaker, but he’ll have to do it for a second time if he hopes to get re-elected. The Calgary-Hays NDP would be well-advised to make this an election issue for 2027, starting now. The UCP take the people of Calgary-Hays for granted, and Devin Dreeshen has just given them the middle finger.
This is simple math. The UCP decided that 1.4M people of Calgary don’t matter when it comes to clean drinking water. Then they flaunted the $46M hospital they’re giving to the 3800 people of La Crete, by way of Covenant Health. To rub that wound with salt, the UCP also decided weeks later that the 350,000 people of southeast Calgary don’t matter when it comes to transportation. But really, that’s a second middle finger to the 1.4M.
Danielle Smith said she didn’t need Calgary during the last election, but do the math. Pi$$ on 1.4M people, then pi$$ on 350,000 of them again, weeks later. Cities of 1.4M people don’t matter at all. Tiny places with 3800 people in the middle of literally “nowhere” get all the goods. If this isn’t an election issue that should stir the NDP out of their summer slumber, I don’t know what is. FAFO, as the kids say.
I think the kids today would say Alberta’s TBA government is skibidi Ohio.
It is critical that we work to ensure that urban voters can vote. Bill 20 changed some voting rules (no vouching, photo ID, and the pilot project (only in Edmonton and Calgary) of party politics.
My complaining on this blog does not replace action.
The UCP is intent on undermining the municipal gov’ts of Edmonton and Calgary cause we didn’t vote their way. A few hundred votes could be the swing factor in some wards.
Municipal elections are just a year away. Keep talking to your neighbours about Bill 20.
Someone in Alberta needs to set up a website like this one before the next election.
https://iwillvote.com/
I always vote in civic elections – if they are held. Since we moved out of the City of Grande Prairie to live in the adjacent County of the same name some 14 years ago, we have only once had a contested election in our ward for County Council. Every other year our Councillor was acclaimed.
As for the post of Reeve – that quaint word for the county equivalent of a mayor – that position is not elected by voters at all, but by County Council at its first meeting after the election, from amongst its members.
In fact the only ballot I had to cast last time out was for the Peace Wapiti Public School Division trustee in our ward, even though I barely knew any of the candidates or issues (our kids went to Grande Prairie Public schools, and now our grandchildren are).
So, if there are contested elections, I’ll vote.
So the UCP has decided to make all out war on the very city it needs to carry for reelection. Interesting ploy, not sure how well it will work.
Passing thought— So exactly what kind of a deal did DS sign with Governor Abbott, that she needed the, $1.3 billion for; another Kennyish pipeline for the “drill baby drill ” candidate?
It couldn’t happen twice to Alberta taxpayers? Right? Right?
Drunken Dreeshen has stepped in it this time! Oh! Did Dani make him do it?
Hello DJC and fellow commenters,
I think that Public servant is right that giving so much money to the owners of sports teams seems excessive.
DJC, you comment that 2 contradictory ideas are too much for Danielle Smith to contemplate. Are you implying that she could put one idea into her head? Or maybe the answer is none, leastways she doesn’t seem to think of any good ideas.
I still find it incredible that Danielle Smith acts as if Alberta is her personal fiefdom.
At this point, where Calgary is concerned, the UCP have reached an inflection point. If they pull support for Greenline, and they very much want to (for reasons …) they an awesome chance to make a lot of idiots in their base happy. Anyone is against public anything will be having orgasmic fits over this one. And the O&G lobby will out of their minds be for this because more cars on the room will be needed. And for transit users who don’t have or can’t afford a car, one will be provided free-of-charge by the UCP, which will make car dealerships orgasmic. And there’s the small matter of the infrastructure being inadequate for that many drivers, don’t worry; the UCP will provide hundreds of billions in funds to build fantastic infrastructure projects, which will be construction contractors freaky high. Jesus would.
Devin Dreeshen, like all his so called colleagues in the bloated cabinet of “Hair Hitmiss”, does what he’s told. The fact that when he does what he’s told it turns out to be do-do? That’s on him! Rightly so, by the way! The UCP is a seething mess of corrupt and stupid ideas. I hope they wear the Green-line proudly! Along with their lederhosen !
As an aside. It would be wrong if I didn’t leave a tune from one of the purest voices! For the poor suffering souls in Dani’s cabinet then! https://youtu.be/fW1gMVw_LtI
Had to rub my eyes —for a moment there I thought I read “Devin Green” and everything seemed about as expected—until I realized it’s “Devin Dreeshen”. Oooooh, well, I can watch “Betty Bowers—America’s Best Christian”— videos any old time.
But Dreeshen? Well, he chugs towards the smoke-filled bar to toast the Green Line and then, 36 days later, chugs back out the swinging doors rolling up the tracks. At risk of mixing Merelephors , maybe the bottle let him down. Not only does the flashing neon sign create a stilted effect on his slo-mo train-wreck, he can’t escape the fact that he’s let a lot of people down.
But Calgary?—Calgary, the once and future battleground for provincial power where Dreeshen’s TUBCRAP government can’t afford to lose any votes? One question is whether he’ll still be here at closing time (apologies to the late Mr Haggard).
Lovin’ the serial exposé of Nenshi’s facial expressions, kinda like a very slo-mo, stroboscopic montage of wry reaction to Dreeshen scapegoating him or puzzlement about Danielle Smith’s predictably surprising announcements or dismissiveness of other newsworthy Alberta politics reported here. Anyway, in lieu of the new NDP leader’s scarceness, they’ll have to do—so, bravo!
I mean, non-partisan-purpleship is one thing, but in this case Dreeshen’s aiming vitriol squarely and unfairly at Nenshi. You’d think the former Mayor might respond in higher-definition. It seems both politicians (I almost mistakenly said, “MLAs”) are loading a lot onto current Mayor Jyoti.
At least it’s a good thing that Dreeshen’s part of the Smith&Parker Gang: ain’t straight-shooters and can’t shoot straight. They’re a Pottery Barn-owner’s dream-come-true.