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.  

A Modest Proposal On Firearms

For years the argument has been made that regulations related to firearms are just a means for the government to subjugate the populace.

However, I have never heard any of these same people object to the reality that the same government insists that they register their car, carry insurance on the vehicle and pay taxes on the fuel that we use to run our vehicles.

Let's take a look at this for a few minutes, shall we?

In principle, a car is a mode of transportation.  It is purely civilian in its use.  In fact, using gun lobby logic, there is exactly no reason that we should have to register it to have it on the roads.  After all, cars don't commit crimes, people do, right?  Well, yes.

But, and there is a big but.  Accidents happen, people lose control of their vehicles and crash them.  Pedestrians crossing the roads get hit and injured all the time.  Being able to identify the owners of said vehicles goes a long ways to figuring out who did what in such circumstances.  Is this a bad thing?  Not at all.

Which leads me to the next point - insurance.  We are obliged to carry insurance on the vehicles we drive as a matter of course.  The reason for this is not that anyone is planning to kill others with the car (remarkably easy to do), or do damage to other people's property with said car (also remarkably easy to do), but because there is a likelihood that those accidents will happen and reparations will need to be made.  Most of us don't have a spare million dollars sitting in the bank to self-insure against the costs of long term injuries.

Licensing is a necessity.  We are required to demonstrate that we are competent to operate a motor vehicle safely.  That costs money too.

Gas taxes...we all hate them, but they are a fact of life.  We don't manage to escape them.  They are there, and in principle are used to in part to pay for the infrastructure we drive on.

So, let's turn briefly to the question of guns.  Guns are weapons.  They come out of a desire/need to kill things.  There is no other use for them beyond target practice.  You are either shooting to kill something or someone, or you are shooting at targets.  I can drive a car safely and not hurt anyone or anything else (save for a few bugs on the windshield), and similarly one can operate a gun in a safe manner.  There are inherent risks with both.

Registering a gun.  Why is this a bad thing?

The gun lobby would have you believe that the government will be at your door taking it away as soon as you register it.  To a certain degree, they have a concern here.  Governments have had a track record of arbitrarily changing the rules around what types of guns are legal or not.  Then again, they do the same thing with cars.  There are rules around what is a "street legal" car and what isn't.  Don't be fooled into thinking that you won't find yourself with a heap of trouble if your vehicle doesn't comply with the rules.

However, this doesn't change the reality that a legal obligation to register the fact you own firearms is really little different from having to register a vehicle.  Yes, there are rules.  You may disagree with the rules about what is legal or not, but those rules still exist.  I don't see where that's a bad thing.

Licensing.  Should you have to demonstrate basic competence with the maintenance, operation and storage of firearms?  I don't see why this is even remotely unreasonable.  Of all things, a mishandled firearm is far more likely to result in serious injury or even death than even a car.  As far as I am concerned, the notion of being able to own firearms without demonstrating basic competency with safety and operation of them is ridiculous.  The current "Firearms Acquisition Certificate" or whatever it's called in Canada these days is far too lax in this regard.

Insurance.  This one will no doubt get a whole lot of people riled up.  As far as I am concerned, if you own firearms it should be mandatory to carry personal liability insurance.  The simple fact is that just like a car, it is incredibly easy to injure another party with a firearm even in accidental circumstances.

As far as I am concerned, we need to treat firearms with the same kind of approach that we do cars.  Yes, there will be regulations on them.  That's a fact of life.  If you are going to own them, registration, licensing and insurance should all be mandatory.

Will this stop criminals from committing crimes?  No.  That isn't the objective.  The objective here is to ensure that those who do choose to own firearms do so responsibly in a manner that is generally safe.  Just as we cannot stop a criminal from stealing a car and driving it dangerously, we cannot stop a criminal from acquiring firearms illegally.  That is not, and never will be the objective.  Ensuring that those who choose to own guns legally do so with an eye to public safety and the liability that comes with owning a weapon of violence is another thing altogether.  If that happens to reduce the supply of firearms available to criminals on the way by, that would be an unexpected bonus.