CALGARY – In what had to be a humiliating climbdown, Alberta Transportation Minister Devin Dreeshen issued a joint statement this morning with Calgary Mayor Jyoti Gondek explaining that the Green Line LRT project is back on again, sort of.
On Sept. 2, the feckless thirtysomething MLA for Innisfail-Sylvan Lake wrote a rude letter to Mayor Gondek informing her that the province was pulling its promised $1.53-billion contribution to the Green Line light rail transit project, which a month earlier he’d stated was 100-per-cent secure.
Never mind the fact that city taxpayers had already sunk $1.5 billion into the $6.3-billion project on the strength of the province’s commitment, the deal appeared to be kaput.
It must have been quite the reaction Mr. Dreeshen got, though. At any rate, another month has passed, and the minister has executed yet another screeching turn on the Green Line.
“Over the past few weeks, the City of Calgary and Alberta’s Government have engaged in productive discussions to deliver a Green Line that meets the needs of Calgary’s commuters and preserves value from the previous Phase 1 of the project,” said the statement’s face-saving opening.
“This decision not only works to preserve more than 700 jobs, but also builds on the shared investments we have made towards the Green Line,” it continued, the jobs in question being the ones Mr. Dreeshen intemperately put at risk with his sudden decision to pull the plug on the promised provincial contribution, presumably because he saw it as a way to attack former Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi.
Mr. Nenshi, of course, is now the leader of the Alberta NDP and as such is obviously taken seriously enough to be considered worthy of some serious political sabotage, even if it cost Calgary taxpayers whose votes one would have thought the UCP might have wanted a billion dollars or more.
Well, perhaps cooler heads in the Premier’s Office – if such things exist – took a more sober look at the damage Mr. Dreeshen was doing and decided to ask the young man best known for his MAGA enthusiasm and political volunteerism south of the Canada-U.S. border to simmer down a little.
At any rate, said the statement (which sounded as if it had been entirely written by Mr. Dreeshen’s staff, “as part of our meetings, the province reaffirmed that the previously committed funding of $1.53B remains available to support the continuation of this work during the interim period.”
For his part, Mr. Nenshi was not impressed. “Yet again, the premier and her minister careen from crisis to crisis, this time trying to solve a catastrophe of their own making,” he said in a statement it must have been quite satisfying to sign off on. “They lit over $2 billion on fire, and now are desperately backing down, trying to save the Green Line that they killed.”
He continued: “Minister Dreeshen told hundreds of workers that they were OK in August, that they would lose their jobs in September, and now in October that they’ll be OK until Christmas. Maybe.”
He was referring to joint statement’s explanation that an engineering firm approved of by the province “is developing a revised alignment for the downtown on behalf of the province.”
One supposes that if the city doesn’t like those plans – quite possible given the history of the project – Mr. Dreeshen will have another snit and call the whole thing off again.
Why not? It’s been affirmed, unaffirmed, and reaffirmed in 30-day intervals now – enough to give Calgary voters whiplash! So it can obviously all be re-un-affirmed again in another 30 days or so.
“This incompetence comes at significant cost,” said Mr. Nenshi. “You can’t affirm contracts, then cancel them, then reinstate them without significant financial penalty.”
Well, to be fair, I guess you can if you’re a UCP minister from rural Alberta.
“The direct costs of this misadventure will likely total over $1 billion in penalties, and increase the cost of every provincial construction project for years to come due to new risk premiums,” Mr. Nenshi said.
As the former mayor added, “this is not over.” There will soon be more fighting about how, or whether, the line makes its way through Calgary’s downtown.
“Every Albertan deserves to see a complete public accounting of the costs of the UCP government’s mishandling of the largest infrastructure project in Calgary’s history,” Mr. Nenshi stated. It’s hard to argue with that, with the caveat that we don’t always get what we deserve.
Good for Mayor Gondek for trying to keep this project on the rails. It can’t be easy.
This very costly fiasco lies squarely on the UCP, because of their dithering, making excuses, and inconsistent commitment to the Green Line project. They think they can use Naheed Nenshi as a scapegoat, because Danielle Smith has to make herself look like a saint, come November 1 and 2, when her leadership review is taking place. In advance of this leadership review, Postmedia newspaper columnists are trying their hardest to paint Naheed Nenshi as a villan, while making Danielle Smith look good. The comment sections in these newspapers are mainly comprised of people who are intent on giving Danielle Smith and the UCP accolades, and making it look like Naheed Nenshi is responsible for what went wrong here. In advance of her leadership review, Danielle Smith is doing all kinds of different things to appease different factions, from Take Back Alberta, who ultimately control her fate as premier, doctors (whom the UCP angered), and Albertans in general. Desperation is setting in for Danielle Smith. It will be interesting to see how her leadership review results turn out.
This saga has more twists and turns than a country road. This project has been on again, off again so many times under the provincial government. The only constant is while other infrastructure projects in Alberta moved ahead over the years, the delays here have led to rising costs.
The UCP had not been enthusiastic about this project at the best of times and these are far from the best of times for it. I can understand the temptation for a party that sees enemies everywhere, seems to enjoy picking fights and likes to throw its weight around bullying those it thinks it can, such as municipalities.
So it may have seemed like a good idea at the time for some in the UCP to abruptly cancel this project, just weeks after affirming support for it, as a way to get back at both Nenshi and the current beleaguered mayor of Calgary.
However, as sometimes over confident conservatives in Alberta do, they overplayed their hand here. Rather than supposedly fix the problems with this project, they destroyed it. Now even they realize they will have to try put the pieces back together somehow.
I remember decades ago when another much more popular provincial government got into a war with a major Alberta city over long distance telephone tolls. They may have won the battle initially, but in the end they lost the war. It is still not a good idea politically for a provincial government to be seen as against local interests.
Utter incompetence! Prorsus imperitia!
Who knew?
A new motto for the Albaturda shield.
What a bunch of bozos!
And here we thought flip – flop season was over, but alas it goes on and on. The UCP seems to like spending billions in Calgary while Edmonton seemingly gets nothing. In Calgary, they have the green line ($1.5B), they just built South Campus Health Care Center (over $1B), and are putting hundreds on millions into a new rink for the Flames. Meanwhile, they cancelled building a badly needed hospital on the South Side of Edmonton. Looks like the UCP doesn’t care about Edmonton because it is unlikely we will vote for them, although much of this monkey business is why we didn’t vote for them in the first place.
And that South Edmonton hospital sure would be handy: https://edmonton.ctvnews.ca/on-the-brink-of-collapse-doctors-warn-edmonton-area-hospitals-are-at-capacity-1.7068842
Once again we see Smith trying to save her ass. Knowing it could cost her votes. Likely if she is re- elected she will once again pull the plug and destroy the jobs. It’s no secret that Reformers destroy Jobs not create them as the former conservative MLAs taught me. You can’t trust a Reformer.
Alan K. Spiller: That’s exactly how I see this.
Transcript of hypothetical discussion in Premier’s office “We won 5 seats in Calgary by less than 1000 votes, most of them less than 500 votes. Dreeshan is costing us the next election. Tell him to fix his mess, sit down, and shut up.”
These five Calgary seats would provide an excellent opportunity for Calgarians to express their irritation with the UCP in a clear and unambiguous way.
There are five Calgary UCP MLAs who are vulnerable, going by the margins that sent them to Edmonton, to recall petitions. Even if petitions were successfully registered in all five ridings, there’d be no guarantee that any of them would result in an actual recall, but it would be salutary, watching the UCP decrying such exercises in grass-roots democracy.
I read up on the recall law; even getting a petition registered is a high bar to meet. I would really like to see the losing NDP candidates launch recalls in all 6 ridings (Lethbridge West was the other squeaker). Near as I could tell, so long as the NDP doesn’t put in any money or manpower, it’s legal for a losing candidate to try the recall petition.
Of course, doing so could result in recalls on the NDP. After all, Tyler Shandro lost Calgary-Acadia by all of 22 votes. There were 1 or 2 other ridings won by the NDP with <= 500 votes.
But seeing the clown party lose what passes for their minds being hoist on their petard is just a wonderful thought. And the rapid changes to the recall law that they would attempt would cause even more long term damage to them.
The young lad needs to be sent to the back bench where he can drink his 36’s of Blue in peace.
Devin the “Drunken” needs A “Dreeshen”. After that? Maybe intelligent people can fix the sophomoric crap these useless car party drive through politicians inflict us with!
My goodness! A mayor who stands up to provincial government in the interests of the city and its people. Hello, mayor Olivia Cowed?
The Ucp look like a group of incompetent bozos! They let junior from a rural reform riding dictate the lives of 1000s of Calgarians which include workers, transit riders, developers etc.. for what? A month of foolish grandstanding !
I wouldn’t let these clowns manage a lemonade stand. Add this to the renewable energy debacle and you have utter incompetence.
I hope TBA and 1905 are satisfied!
If the official statement seems like it came out of someone else’s mouth, Devin Dreeshen set things straight in an interview with the Calgary Herald.
“To say I somehow backed down. I said the money is here if you guys choose our alignment. And here they are, agreeing to our alignment.
“I don’t know what game of chicken they were playing, they 100 per cent caved. We didn’t flinch and they came on board.”
It’s all a big game of chicken to Devin Dreeshen. This is not a responsible approach to civic duty, nor does it show any sense of responsibility or accountability with billions of dollars and thousands of jobs on the line. Just one big ole crapshoot. Shields up! Who knew we’d have a government that treats 4.3 million people with contempt, disrespects others who take their elected duties seriously and treats the public purse like a tween’s allowance? Well, that’s what we have now. If some new whim or sudden urge to play “gotcha” arises, arrested development might rear its ugly head again. Why should anyone trust this man or believe as nothing he says in the future? The man-child can’t even grow up, like most people his age. Maybe he should go to Las Vegas and spend his own money on the old nickel slots for cheap thrills.
I don’t know if anyone here knows how depraved the people they oppose really are! You want an example? My old people owned dogs, their job, apart from being great friends to children, was to warn about any intruders. Those pooches likely decided it was a wise idea to chase cars. The deplorable cohort decided that it would be clever to bolt long rags to their wheel rims so that the dogs chasing cars could catch them and die with a snapped neck. We had a word for those people. I’m sure with our expanded vernacular in this our post modern time, you might have one as well!
It’s amazing to me that with urban voters anyway, the UCP prefers the stick to the extent the carrot does not exist. Who in this brain trust thinks is a tried and true tactic to BULLY cities into voting for you ? These people are incompetent at best, corrupt to a level of certainty rarely seen in western politics, and idiots to a person, who can’t see past their own egos long enough to see what time it is.
The high street of the capital city is a pockmarked mess of vacant corporate leases, money laundering, and a houseless population pushed south (from the billionaires “Ice District”) living in utter despair. 7-11 can’t even keep a store front going on whyte ave, supposedly one of the most trafficked streets in the entire country.
This week it was revealed houseless folks desperate for shelter had hollowed out the north side of the high level bridge to the point the support pillar was just resting on a single
Column of dirt.
The billions the UCP has cut , the hundreds of millions of taxes they refuse to pay to artificially pump up their budget surplus, ALL OF THOSE THINGS STILL COST MONEY. Albertans will have to pay for them eventually ! And this crew of charlatans, hacks, and unrepentant assholes will be long gone, their cheques long cashed, the palms of their betters well greased to ensure a cushy c-suite where dreeshan can “shields up” all day if he so pleases.
What pathetic excuses for humanity, to a person. I hope I can meet Dreeshan some day, so I can tell him straight to his face what a sad pathetic little scrap of a boy he is.
Apparently 47% of Alberta MP’s are landlords. A significant number of MLA’s are also landlords. There has not been a single new housing co-operative built in Calgary since 1987. And yet it is nigh on impossible to obtain a spot on a waiting list for the 13 existing co-ops in Calgary. Odd that there is such high demand for something that apparently nobody wanted once Getty started ploughing the field for Klein and the Grift-o-kons. I was at a homeless encampment under a bridge on a boulevard several weeks ago at which an enormous parapet of stone and earth had been erected. Inside the parapet a great fire had been set which had damaged the bridge. The mole-people home in the side of Union Cemetery discovered in September is reported to have been 10 feet deep, but I have heard reliable accounts that it was as deep as thirty feet. The city of Calgary has hired twenty-five new police officers to deal with “social disorder” while the alleyways in the core are open-air toilets for people who are disabled from drug abuse. As with most problems in the post-1972 world, the police will do a bang-up job of fixing it, I am sure.
Those of us who travel around the province have seen what Smith has done for Rural Albertans who blindly supported her. Over the summer the gas at the pumps has usually been 5 to 20 cents a litre less. Her reward for them for supporting her. Of course she is destroying their health care system because she knows she can and they will still support her.
I would like to believe that’s true but it’s probably more a reflection of the economic realities of running a gas station. Primarily franchisees make their money selling what’s inside the store, the percentage they get from gas sales is negligible. Gasoline taxes are the same everywhere so I can’t see that being manipulated either. It could just be a reflection of oil companies offering a slightly lower price to encourage people to continue to fill up locally ( and get some snacks, lotto, smokes, lubricant, what have you, for the road…)
Alan K. Spiller: It’s just like Ralph Klein. These rural Albertans let these phony Conservatives and Reformers walk all over them, and they don’t care what damage they cause.