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, 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, 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,” 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 August 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,” 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 Dreeshen tossed a spanner in the works.
Back on June 22, 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 Smith.
By this week, obviously, it had sunk in at the Premier’s Office that 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 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,” Dreeshen told 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 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 Dreeshen’s intemperate letter is any guide, the UCP will continue its attack on 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 Smith likes urban voters. She’s already made that quite clear.
As 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 Nenshi.
Will it work in Calgary? Too soon to say.
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Nick Seebruch, editor
