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.  

The Attack On Science Continues

Scientists in Canada have rightly complained about the Harper Government's politicization of the communication of research results, whether that is stripping funding from the the Experimental Lakes Area or sending "minders" to accompany scientists attending conferences.

Well, the degree of politicization goes further.  It seems that when a lab found a virus in farmed salmon, they found themselves stripped of their reference lab status.

Kibenge is not alone in finding positive test results for ISAv in BC salmon.  Several other labs have reported the virus.
 

• Dr. Kristi Miller reports finding ISAv in farmed salmon on the west coast of Vancouver Island, Cohen exhibit 2053, and sockeye, Cohen Exhibit 2060
• Dr. Are Nylund reports positive ISAv test results
• Dr. Kyle Garver, Cohen Exhibit 2043, 2056
• Dr. Sonja Saksida -, BC Centre for Aquatic Health Services, reported ISA PCR positives to the CFIA in the farm Chinook salmon from Creative Salmon, Cohen Exhibit 2055.
• A 2004 draft paper coauthored by Drs. Molly and Fred Kibenge and Drs. Simon Jones and Garth Traxler (DFO) reporting 115 ISA virus positive results. These results demonstrate up to 99.7 per cent identity to an ISAv isolate from Norway. Sequence was produced. Positive samples included farmed Atlantic, wild salmon from Alaskan waters, throughout BC and Cultus Lake sockeye, Cohen Exhibit 2045, (See video – “DFO scientist suppresses positive ISA virus test results”)

Interesting, when the CFIA makes the following rather elliptical claim:

What exactly did Kibenge do wrong? Neither OIE nor CFIA will say exactly why they removed Kibenge’s OIE status, but they do make reference to non-repeatable results, which means the lab the CFIA is using isn’t getting the same results as Kibenge.
Do not seek and you shall not find
Nearly every lab that doesn’t have direct ties with either the government or salmon industry seems to be able to find at least segments of the virus. Meanwhile, every lab that has a vested interest in not finding the virus can’t seem to detect it.
It’s easy to not find this virus if you don’t want to. Here is why: If a virus is imported to a new country, it doesn’t stay the same for long. Influenza viruses like ISAv are known for their rapid mutations, which is precisely what makes them so dangerous.

If you use a PCR test that only reports an exact match as a “positive” you could easily miss the virus, since even a slight change will make it “invisible” to a probe that is looking for an exact sequence. Kibenge's lab was using a technique that was reading the sequences of the virus, rather than just using a probe that only reports an exact match of a very specific sequence. This is how Kibenge was able to pick up on viral sequences that contained slight variations of the virus, as well as fragments.

Hmmm...so you find different results than the government wants, and you suddenly find yourself stripped of credentials?  To paraphrase Shakespeare, something is rotten in Ottawa.

Think I am exaggerating?  Take a look at this e-mail from the CFIA:

This entire case is a clear example of the kind of politicization that the Harper Conservatives have been engaging in on all fronts.  They are enabling a large scale propaganda campaign to an extent which Canadians have never experienced before, and is drawn from some of the most oppressive regimes that this planet has ever seen.

If they are willing to politicize on this scale, it isn't hard to imagine that recent changes to passports in Canada represent something nefarious.

... oh yes ... Happy Canada Day

Something Foul In The Wind At Passport Canada

It came to my attention a day ago that our government is tinkering with things again...and not in a good way.

In this case, we are talking about Passport Canada - the agency which has been processing and delivering passports to Canadians for years.  (an agency which has been quite efficient in my own experience)  It seems that the government has decided to split Passport Canada in two, with front line services being merged with the Service Canada group, and moving the behind-the-scenes people under Citizenship and Immigration.

On Passport Canada's current "about us" page, we find the following:

Passport Canada is a special operating agency of Foreign Affairs and International Trade Canada responsible for all matters related to Canadian passports. As mandated by the Canadian Passport Order, its responsibilities include issuing, refusing to issue, revoking, withholding, recovering and providing instructions on the use of Canadian passports.

So ... the first question that comes to mind is why is this moving under the auspices of Citizenship and Immigration?

Second, why do we have a "front end" in the form of Service Canada and a "back end" service under a different ministry?

The answer to the first question seems most likely to be rooted in a power play going on at the cabinet table.    It is no secret that Jason Kenney is deemed by many to be Harper's "replacement in waiting".  He has been in the Citizenship and Immigration portfolio for quite some time now.  It seems that he has "accomplished" much of what he was mandated to do when Harper moved him into this position in 2008, and now new responsibilities are coming his way.

My worry with this change to Passport Canada is twofold.  First, I dislike the idea of decision making being decoupled from the frontline services.  It makes it much, much harder to have a coherent discussion about issues if there is a problem with a passport application.  Imagine, if you will, having to file your tax return with Service Canada, and having to deal with Service Canada if there are issues with it, but finding that you are still (ultimately) dealing with some faceless group within the CRA.  Suddenly, the decision makers are completely obscured from scrutiny and challenge.  Worse, the frontline staff are guaranteed to be utterly impotent to deal with actual issues, which further compounds the level of frustration that people will be experiencing.

The second part of my concerns with this change is in the form of recent changes that Jason Kenney has put forward in Bill C-31.  In his overhaul of the immigration act, Minister Kenney gave himself (and future ministers) extraordinary powers to overrule a reasonable due process construct.  In essence, Kenney has just made every decision that Citizenship and Immigration Canada makes subject to political interference through the Minister's offices.

While it is not unusual for the minister to have the power to overturn decisions in exceptional circumstances, the rewrite done under Bill C-31 goes much further than that, and in many respects politicizes the entire immigration process.  In doing so, he has made the immigration decision making processes subject to the political whims of the government of the day to a degree that I suspect few fully comprehend.  (My own review of the revised immigration act is still ongoing, and I expect I will find quite a bit more yet)

Given the Conservative government's willingness to politicize everything in sight, the idea of putting passports under the jurisdiction of a department which has already been yoked by this party - and a minister who is to say the least overbearing in his decision making - has the whiff of passports suddenly becoming subject to political considerations during the issuing process.