The UCP Owns The Green Line Project Fallout

The UCP now owns the entirety of the Green Line debacle.  Every last bit of its demise lands at their doorstep.  

Let me explain a bit here.  The current efforts to get this project underway date back to 2010 or so.  By 2017, the City of Calgary, Province of Alberta, and Government of Canada had all agreed on funding, and an alignment had been worked out.  

The City's own website on the project contains a huge history that goes back to 2011, and proposals around creating the line had been ongoing long before that.  This is reflected by the reality that 52St SE has clear space along its west side from 130 Ave south into Auburn bay.  Considering that MacKenzie Towne started development back in the 1990s, I think this particular project has a much longer history than 2010.  

While I agree with much of what David Climenhaga argues about the immediate fallout from the UCP government's decision, I also think his argument overlooks some very important history - history that needs to be talked about here.  

Political meddling in major infrastructure projects in Alberta isn't new.  The original plans for the LRT in Calgary would have had lines run to all the major quadrants of Calgary by the end of the 1980s.  Clearly that didn't happen, and goodness knows the original south leg alignment has more than a handful of decisions made by skinflint policy makers who panicked over costs instead of paying attention to long term functionality.  Almost always the meddling came from the Provincial Government - usually in the form of withholding funding.  

The 2019 budget tabled by a newly elected UCP government slashed funding to the cities, creating holes and delays for the project. Then, in 2020, McIver slammed the brakes on the Green Line project.  In 2021, the government leaving its foot on the financial brakes meant that construction couldn't start that year and in 2022, the city had restart the bidding process to hire a company to do the construction.  These aren't fast processes and the contracts are complex - plan on it taking the best part of a year (or more) for that to finish up.  

Fast forward to 2024, in spring, Smith takes a swipe at Calgary over possible cost overruns on the Green Line.  On the heels of that, city council goes back and refactors things to reduce cost risk.  The province green lights it, only to completely pull its funding a week or so ago.  

See the pattern here?  The city works diligently to put together a plan, only to have an increasingly interventionist UCP government pull the rug out from underneath it.  More importantly, while the city has been diligently trying to move the project along, it has been the province holding things up for reasons that are increasingly unclear and unreasonable. 

Not only does this underscore the fact that the UCP has no respect for the municipalities, but it is perfectly willing to overturn any decision a municipality makes to satisfy its own political agenda.  In this case, the "agenda" seems to be making people like Jim Gray happy, rather than focusing on Calgarians.  I know Mr. Gray will swear up and down that he has Calgarians' "best interests at heart", but frankly he only does to the extent that he can profit from those interests.  Add to that the sudden interest in building a rail link out to Banff - seemingly to benefit the owners of the Mt Norquay ski hill - one does have to become more than a little bit suspicious that the recent collapse of the Green Line project has much more to do with making certain UCP donors/supporters more wealthy than it does anything else. 

Meanwhile, the province's actions have opened the City of Calgary up to a great deal of both legal and financial liability.  Not only will it cost millions to wind up the current Green Line project, but it will also open the city to lawsuits from the various contractors who are finding their contracts cancelled abruptly based on the Province's actions.  

While the municipality carries the liability for those contracts directly (yet another way the UCP is setting out to further punish Calgary for daring to elect NDP MLAs last election), there is an argument to be made that the City can, and should, sue the province for its actions as being damaging to the fiscal and legal interests of the City.  In fact, recent legislation where the province explicitly gave itself the right to overrule municipal governments when it doesn't like what they are doing could be used in court to argue that the liability at least in part should be shifted to a provincial government that has decided that its authority supersedes that of everybody else. 

In the realm of "unintended consequences", the actions of the province here are going to make it much more costly for Canadian municipalities to negotiate any kind of contract.  It makes absolutely clear that unless the provincial government signs on the dotted line as well, that no contract with a municipal government is secure.  

Canada's Far Right Next Attack On Nenshi

It's no big secret that the Conservative power base in Calgary was profoundly pissed off when Naheed Nenshi won the Mayoral race in 2010.  The amount of vitriol seen in the Sun's pages after election day was astonishing, and since then, they have taken every opportunity to snipe at Nenshi.

This is no surprise.  They were also suspiciously silent when it came out that Cal Wenzel and a bunch of his pals had ponied up over a million dollars to the Manning Centre to build a slate of candidates that would be "friendly" to their interests in the next city council.

Their most recent attack on Nenshi began this week, with the Canadian Taxpayer's Federation publishing an "exposé" of how the City of Calgary had spent money with the Pembina Institute.  According to the CTF, the City spent somewhere on the order of $113,552  (which, frankly, is barely one professional consultant salary) annually with the Pembina Institute.  Apparently, this is a big bad thing.  I will note that CTF says nothing of whether the city has spent money with other "think tank" consultancy organizations or not, but they are certainly vocal about complaining that money was spent with the Pembina Institute.

The funny part about the whole thing is that CTF tips their hand in their interview with the CBC:

But Fildebrandt said it’s hard to imagine the city hiring the right-leaning Fraser Institute to consult on something such as property tax reform.

In short, whether Fildebrandt admits it or not, he's really complaining because he doesn't like the political stripe of the Pembina Institute's positions.

A closer look at the documents that the CTF recovered from the city reveals something much more significant about the spending with Pembina that calls into question the CTF's complaint:

1)  The documents retrieved show spending with the Pembina Institute starting in 2007 through 2012.

2)  Over half of the spending took place before the October 2010 civic election put Nenshi into the Mayor's chair ... which means that the process started under developer darling Dave Bronconnier's tenure as Mayor.

Take a close look at the following summary of invoices from CTF's FOIP documents:

Year	Total Invoices
2007	$10,504.64
2008	$25,196.58
2009	$13,701.92
2010	$178,446.55
2011	$131,384.32
2012	$787.50

If we take a raw average across the full five years, the annual average spend with Pembina was $60,003.59; If we chop off 2007 and 2012 as the outlier times the average spend jumps to $87,182.34.

Going a step or two further, prior to Mayor Nenshi being elected in 2010, the city spent $212,998.53 with the Pembina Institute, and $147,022.98 since.  

While Ezra Levant and the rest of the Sun Media crowd has dutifully jumped all over this faux issue, the reality is that very little, if any, of the spending was initiated under Nenshi.  More to the point, there is no evidence presented that there is any wrongdoing taking place.  

The CTF is busy trying to politicize a non-issue that they likely wouldn't be complaining about if the recipient of this spend was the Fraser Institute or other group that they found to be "ideologically acceptable".  

One can just imagine the outcry if the City of Calgary paid the Fraser Institute to write a report on building a competitive business environment or property tax reform. The contents of the report might contain excellent data and recommendations, but that is to miss the point. Groups engaged in political debate – even the non-partisan – should never receive a penny of taxpayer’s cash.

As we all know, these organizations can structure themselves in such a way that it never appears that the "lobbying part of things" intersects directly with the "consulting" division.  It is no secret that the "Manning Centre for Building Democracy" is built up of at least two divisions:

The Manning Centre is a non-profit corporation that focuses on political, conservative-oriented activities. As such, it is not a registered charity and donations are not eligible for tax receipts. Activities such as research and education, which are classified as charitable, are undertaken by the Manning Foundation – a registered charity.

Note the division of responsibilities?  So, if the City was to hire the Manning Centre for some kind of consultancy would ultimately be hiring what is obviously a partisan organization.  They could create a division called "Manning Competitive Institute" to engage in economic competitive consultation.  On the surface, it would appear to be independent of the other parts of the Manning Centre, but it still ends up as a division of the same organization.

The CTF moaning about the Pembina institute and trying to cover their partisan bias by saying that "no think tank" should get public funds is a very flimsy fig leaf cover.

I might have more respect for the CTF if they had done a survey of how much money is being spent on think tanks in general, instead of attempting to go on a partisan muck-raking expedition and then lying and distorting the results.