Rebel News Podcast - November 29, 2018


How Calgary dodged the Olympic bullet and what’s on the horizon for taxpayers? (Guest: William McBeath)


Episode Stats

Length

30 minutes

Words per Minute

153.08195

Word Count

4,597

Sentence Count

259

Misogynist Sentences

2


Summary

The city of Calgary just avoided having to host the Olympic Games. Now, will this be a gut check to city council about their irresponsibility with taxpayer dollars? We re discussing all that and more on this week s episode of The Gunn Show.


Transcript

00:00:00.000 The city of Calgary just avoided having to host the Olympic Games.
00:00:04.700 Now, will this be a gut check to city council about their irresponsibility with taxpayer dollars?
00:00:10.960 We're discussing all that and more.
00:00:13.840 I'm Sheila Gunn-Reed and you're watching The Gunn Show.
00:00:30.000 November 13th, Calgary's residents wisely voted against a two-week-long legacy party for their mayor, Nahid Nenshi, held in 2026.
00:00:44.440 In a municipal plebiscite, over 300,000 ballots were cast, with over 56% of them going against Calgary hosting the 2026 Olympic Winter Games.
00:00:55.840 Thank God, between IOC corruption and multi-billion dollar expenses that Calgary residents should not be forced to pay for, this is finally a real victory for common sense.
00:01:08.420 Calgary residents saw right through the pro-Olympic publicly funded propaganda being pushed by most of Calgary City Council and the yes side of the debate.
00:01:18.460 Now, will this whole expensive debacle that brought Calgary precariously close to a mistake that would have taken literally decades to pay off be a wake-up call for Calgary City Council?
00:01:30.540 Or does it just mean that now they move on to the next expensive pet project to be laid at the feet of Calgary taxpayers?
00:01:38.580 Joining me tonight to discuss how Calgary dodged the Olympic bullet and what's on the horizon next for Calgary taxpayers suffering through the very worst economic recession in a generation
00:01:51.900 is one of the leading voices of the no-vote side of the Olympic debate and a fearless advocate for municipal accountability.
00:01:59.900 My friend, William Macbeth from Save Calgary.
00:02:08.580 Hey, William, thanks for joining me.
00:02:22.080 Now, I haven't talked to you since the end of October, officially on camera.
00:02:27.060 You and I talk all the time.
00:02:28.020 But first off, I want to congratulate you on being outmanned, outspent, outgunned, really out everything in Calgary up against, you know, the full forces of the city and the Chamber of Commerce, the business community, or rather the crony capitalist community in Calgary.
00:02:51.660 And yet you guys were able to register an overwhelming victory in the Olympics plebiscite.
00:02:58.720 So congratulations on that.
00:03:00.000 And why don't you give us a little bit of a breakdown of how that went?
00:03:04.400 Well, I mean, thank you so much.
00:03:05.940 It definitely was a great night for Calgarians who were concerned about the costs associated with these Olympics.
00:03:13.620 You know, Rick Bell, Sun columnist, said it was a fight between David and Goliath on steroids.
00:03:20.040 And I think that's probably true.
00:03:22.320 We know that the yes side spent millions of dollars and had every piece of institutional support in the city.
00:03:29.620 But when it was left up to the common sense, everyday voters of Calgary, they made the right choice, the responsible choice to say no to the IOC, to say no to higher taxes, and to say no to an Olympics that Calgary, frankly, just can't afford.
00:03:44.040 It was really, it was phenomenal.
00:03:48.060 I watched it very closely and with a lot of interest, and it never really changed.
00:03:53.960 The early voters, the advance polls showed that the no side was winning, and that held right through all the way to the very end.
00:04:05.340 And it was actually a much more decisive victory than I thought it would be.
00:04:11.160 So that, I mean, it's just phenomenal news and great work and a true testament to really the power of the people when highly motivated and well-informed in Calgary.
00:04:23.040 And I think you guys played an instrumental role in that.
00:04:25.120 Well, I mean, thank you.
00:04:26.740 And I would say, certainly, it was the first time that I think a lot of our establishment in Calgary, from big business to city council to all of the taxpayer-funded groups that exist, like the Chamber of Commerce, really got a pushback on the part of everyday voters who said,
00:04:46.340 we're sick and tired of you telling us what to think and what we should be doing instead of listening to us about what our concerns are.
00:04:54.200 How can we be talking about hosting an Olympics when we can't even plow the roads and fill potholes successfully?
00:05:01.600 Yeah, and I mean, it was the first time that the people who are footing the bill for these sorts of things got their say in how their money is spent.
00:05:11.740 And, you know, direct democracy is a wonderful thing.
00:05:15.660 We're just overwhelmingly thrilled that, first of all, we had this vote at all, because that was back in the summer, that was by no means guaranteed.
00:05:23.040 It was, you know, one of the few times you and I have ever said something good about Rachel Notley and the NDP was the fact that they required a vote.
00:05:31.260 And then to watch the yes side become increasingly more frantic and flailing towards the end of the campaign when they realized that the promises they were making just weren't resonating with Calgary voters,
00:05:46.360 that Calgary voters didn't believe they were going to get a 10 to 1 return on investment,
00:05:51.180 that Calgary voters didn't believe it was going to boost Calgary's economy by 7.4 billion,
00:05:56.080 that they didn't believe that it was going to address affordable housing in this city.
00:06:01.680 Calgary voters said, we just don't believe you.
00:06:04.120 And we're saying no.
00:06:05.860 It was almost like the yes side didn't think that Calgary voters had access to the news or the internet or like Google to see how other Olympics had worked out.
00:06:16.140 It was really quite phenomenal.
00:06:17.400 But this Olympics just won't quite die.
00:06:21.780 Like you just can't stick a stake in the heart of it quite yet.
00:06:25.060 There was some sort of banter around Edmonton City Hall that some groups wanted Edmonton to pick it up.
00:06:33.620 And that horrifies me just as an Albertan.
00:06:36.420 I don't live in the city of Edmonton, but it seems as though everybody ends up paying for these sorts of things.
00:06:41.520 So it sounds like that is dead and that was just some sort of idle musing, but you never really know with progressives, do you?
00:06:50.480 No, fingers crossed.
00:06:52.200 As I've said, one of the things that I would love to see is an Olympic cycle where no city ends up bidding.
00:06:58.700 I don't think you could send a stronger message to the International Olympic Committee that we want change,
00:07:04.840 that we need to do business differently when it comes to the Olympics than if nobody bids for an Olympics one cycle.
00:07:11.120 I think that would be tremendous if that happens.
00:07:13.920 What a powerful message that would send to those oligarchs and aristocrats at the IOC.
00:07:20.100 Now, things are sort of getting back to usual at Calgary City Hall, back to usual meaning back to the unaccountable business of Mayor Nenshi.
00:07:31.140 You know, things as usual as wasting more money on hideous public art.
00:07:37.620 I hear there's another art installation going up.
00:07:41.120 It's $900,000 and it appears to be a wire mesh boomerang.
00:07:46.880 And, you know, it's one of those ones where you look at it and you'll never be able to tell if it's finished or if it's still in construction because it's just so ungainly.
00:07:55.820 You know, maybe that's the plan.
00:07:58.240 Like, maybe that's the plan.
00:07:59.620 If they keep putting up all these art installations that look sort of like half-finished construction projects,
00:08:04.900 it'll convince people that Calgary is starting to recover from the economic downturn.
00:08:08.820 But I guess when the weeds start growing up around it, that'll give away the secret plan.
00:08:18.320 Yeah, you know, I'm not against public art.
00:08:21.620 I don't think that, you know, I think it can in many cases help make a city more interesting and more beautiful.
00:08:27.960 But I fail to understand how our art committee is evaluating and choosing the pieces it does.
00:08:35.800 I mean, you look at our famous Beaufort Towers out west of the city.
00:08:39.180 The what looks very much like an unremoved part of a demolition site.
00:08:45.720 The outcry on that one was so loud that they canceled the second part of it.
00:08:51.440 And so, you know, now we're left with half of an art installation that everybody agrees is hideous.
00:08:59.940 That they pretended had some sort of First Nations, you know, meaning until the First Nations came out and said, absolutely not.
00:09:08.500 So to me, I don't know.
00:09:10.420 They're going to have to have a really hard look in the mirror, though,
00:09:12.360 because I think Calgarians are getting pretty fed up about what's being called public art and how much it costs.
00:09:18.360 Yeah, and from what I understand, this latest artist isn't even Calgarian, let alone Canadian.
00:09:23.300 No, apparently in a province of 4 million people in a city of 1.4 million, we don't have any artists.
00:09:29.780 Not enough garbage artists.
00:09:33.000 Maybe ours are too good.
00:09:34.580 So maybe that's the problem.
00:09:35.420 Yeah, ours are producing things that people want to look at that don't give you vertigo when you stare at it.
00:09:42.080 Now, I wanted to talk to you a little bit about what the final tally is for the Olympics.
00:09:48.940 Or do we even know what this, like, unyielding pursuit of Olympic dreams on behalf of Mayor Nenshi,
00:09:55.280 do we have, like, a ballpark figure of what that costs the city of Calgary to pursue literally nothing?
00:10:00.500 At this stage, no, we don't.
00:10:04.180 There's been a direction passed that BigCo, the company in charge of the bid, should release full and complete financial information.
00:10:13.380 But, of course, BigCo is not subject to freedom of information laws.
00:10:17.440 So we can't have the same assurance that if and when they release numbers, they're going to be the full and complete picture.
00:10:24.560 We do know that the number is in the millions.
00:10:29.020 And I think the number is actually in the tens of millions.
00:10:31.240 I think we're well above $10 million just on the fall 2018 phase.
00:10:37.600 We know they spent over a million dollars in the last week of the plebiscite.
00:10:42.900 Their ads in this city were everywhere.
00:10:44.560 They were on the radio.
00:10:46.840 They were on the television.
00:10:48.400 You couldn't go to a website without being bombarded by pro-Olympic things.
00:10:54.120 They had hundreds of paid people working in the final days.
00:10:59.300 So we know that the number is going to be in the millions.
00:11:01.460 If we, I don't know, we're ever going to find out what the full and complete number is,
00:11:05.180 from when the Bid Exploration Committee first started its work through to when BigCo finally stops all operations and stops spending money.
00:11:15.340 I don't know if we're going to get that number.
00:11:17.520 Oh, Lord.
00:11:18.280 And you know what?
00:11:19.100 We're just going to have to trust Mayor Nenshi because he never holds, well, not never,
00:11:25.400 but rarely holds council meetings in a manner that is available to the public.
00:11:32.080 I think, you would know better than I, but I think that Calgary City Council holds the most in-camera meetings of any city council in the entire country.
00:11:43.700 By a huge margin.
00:11:46.720 You know, the Manning Foundation did an analysis of how often Calgary City Council meets in secret.
00:11:53.740 And the number was over 700 times between the last two election cycles.
00:12:00.860 And to compare it to, for example, Toronto, who met in secret 18 times, that's one-eight times,
00:12:07.300 and the city of Ottawa that met in secret just once.
00:12:10.660 So Ottawa and Calgary, cities of roughly the same size.
00:12:14.200 Ottawa met in secret once.
00:12:16.520 Calgary met in secret over 700 times.
00:12:19.020 It holds the world record as near as we can tell for a meeting in secret.
00:12:23.240 In fact, they meet in secret so often, they've built themselves a new boardroom where they hold their secret meetings.
00:12:31.740 They happen so frequently, they need a dedicated secret meeting room, which some people have called Calgary's Chamber of Secrets,
00:12:37.760 in order to hold their all-too-frequent secret meetings.
00:12:42.000 He has a secret lair, like Dr. Evil.
00:12:46.620 Yes, it's true.
00:12:47.240 Now, I don't think ours is in a hollowed-out volcano, but maybe I haven't looked at the bunch of projections closely enough yet.
00:12:53.780 If they called it public art, they would put it in a hollowed-out volcano.
00:12:59.280 Now, but I heard Nenshi is saying that he thinks the city is very, very, very well-run.
00:13:06.780 Yes, I've heard him make that claim, too.
00:13:10.620 I've heard him say that the Olympic bid process, which so many Calgarians objected to so strongly that they,
00:13:17.980 you know, at the first available opportunity sent to packing,
00:13:20.960 was a model for how other cities should pursue an Olympic bid.
00:13:27.000 And to me, that's mystifying, given that this was a bid where they couldn't even get their other government funding partners on the same page
00:13:35.680 until a week before the vote actually happened.
00:13:38.960 And even then, there was still a lack of clarity about who was paying for certain parts of the Olympics,
00:13:45.080 where they had to be kicked and dragged in order to provide even the most high-level financial information.
00:13:53.060 And then again, they did not provide it by the one month before the vote deadline the council had set.
00:13:59.280 So, you know, to me, how can you call this a model for other cities?
00:14:03.220 I mean, maybe it is a model, but it's a model of what not to do,
00:14:05.980 not a model of how to hold the most open, transparent Olympic bid process ever.
00:14:11.260 Now, thank God that's over.
00:14:15.600 Our provincial nightmare is over.
00:14:17.720 But that hasn't stopped Save Calgary from hammering down on city council.
00:14:25.240 And you guys have some new and exciting initiatives in the works.
00:14:30.860 So, you know, what's interesting is, of course, the day after the Olympic plebiscite vote happened,
00:14:37.660 the city released its proposed four-year budget.
00:14:40.520 And we discovered exactly how dire the financial situation is for the city of Calgary.
00:14:46.660 Possibly, some of us felt that this would have been a helpful piece of information to have before the Olympic vote.
00:14:52.640 But it just, I guess, conveniently just came out afterwards.
00:14:56.040 And what it showed is that because of low commodity prices
00:15:00.100 and how hard hit Alberta's energy sector has been
00:15:03.560 because of the federal liberal failure to proceed with pipelines,
00:15:09.200 we are not collecting a lot of tax revenue from the big downtown office towers in Calgary
00:15:15.280 that we have in the past.
00:15:16.480 So there's a huge hole now in Calgary's budget and in Calgary's tax revenue.
00:15:21.800 And that hole has to be filled.
00:15:24.860 And so what they've proposed is a four-year tax hike plan
00:15:30.360 that would see property taxes increase by 12.5% over the next four years
00:15:37.220 and a transfer of the burden of taxes away from the downtown towers
00:15:43.120 and onto the backs of families and small businesses outside of the downtown core.
00:15:49.600 In some cases, that could mean a small business is going to face a property tax increase of 25%.
00:15:55.700 And if the problem doesn't get any better, what that means is hundreds of dollars in property tax increases for families
00:16:04.080 and thousands of dollars of property tax increases for businesses.
00:16:08.900 And you can only imagine how much worse it would have been
00:16:10.860 if we had to pay for a multi-billion dollar Olympics on top of that.
00:16:14.740 Good Lord.
00:16:16.100 So what is Save Calgary's role in all of this?
00:16:20.840 What are you trying to do to affect some sort of transparency and change?
00:16:26.740 For us, the big concern is big companies and small companies and even families,
00:16:33.580 when they encounter tough economic times, all do the same thing.
00:16:37.260 They look at what they're spending every month.
00:16:40.580 They look at what they're spending on things they have to have.
00:16:43.260 And then they look at what they're spending on things that are nice to have.
00:16:46.500 And then they cut spending on the things that are nice to have in order to make ends meet.
00:16:51.720 They prioritize because at the end of the day, a family has to pay its mortgage.
00:16:56.200 It has to buy groceries.
00:16:57.380 It has to put gas in the car.
00:16:59.020 These are all things it has to do.
00:17:00.580 But maybe it doesn't buy a new car.
00:17:02.540 Maybe it doesn't.
00:17:03.480 They don't go on vacation that summer.
00:17:06.000 They tighten their belts in tough times.
00:17:08.220 And it's something that the city, in our opinion, hasn't looked at closely enough or maybe they just haven't accepted the reality of how bad the times are here in Calgary.
00:17:19.740 Because when the administration put forward its budget proposal, it contained a series of tax increase options on families, on businesses, on families and businesses.
00:17:29.920 But what it didn't contain was a meaningful spending reduction plan to make running the city of Calgary cheaper year after year.
00:17:39.120 And that is something that Save Calgary is advocating for quite strongly in this budget cycle.
00:17:43.020 Well, and, you know, it's tough economic times.
00:17:46.660 You would think that the city of Calgary, with the vacancy rate downtown, would be trying to encourage businesses to move into Calgary, to replace that tax base, to, you know, get businesses moving back into those empty office towers.
00:18:00.520 But nothing discourages businesses from moving into your jurisdiction like, I don't know, higher taxes.
00:18:06.760 You're absolutely right.
00:18:07.760 And when we were asked during this whole Olympic odyssey what our plan was, we said quite simply, look, an Olympics doesn't fix Calgary's economic problems.
00:18:18.240 Boosting Calgary's economy by having private sector businesses set up and grow their operations in this city, hiring people, making investments, that's what's going to turn around the tough times here in our city.
00:18:31.160 And what you're doing, though, is sending the message that you don't want people to come here and set up businesses.
00:18:36.320 You want them to go outside of Calgary jurisdiction because taxes and red tape are too high for businesses to be able to operate here and still make money.
00:18:45.360 So for us, the concern we've had is the city has found some savings, and I want to credit the city for the work they've already done.
00:18:53.220 But the single biggest line item in the city's budget remains salaries, wages, benefits, and pensions.
00:19:00.060 And that's a number that's increased by 42% between 2010 and 2017.
00:19:07.860 So in just seven years, the spending the city does on salaries, wages, benefits, and pensions has gone up 42%.
00:19:14.840 That is wholly unsustainable.
00:19:18.660 And so for us, we said, look, this is going to be an unpleasant conversation.
00:19:22.200 We're going to talk about some unpleasant things.
00:19:24.580 And one of them is we need to look at workforce reductions.
00:19:27.820 We need to look at salary cuts.
00:19:29.280 We need to look at how we make benefits more affordable.
00:19:33.420 And maybe that means employees shouldering more of the premium costs for those benefits.
00:19:38.320 And we have to end defined benefit pension plans for city employees because just like they have in almost every other case,
00:19:45.200 those pension plans can bankrupt a city once too many people start drawing out money from them after they retire.
00:19:52.760 You know, and that is shocking when you say that it is over 40%.
00:19:56.660 When you compare that to the private sector business experience, especially in Calgary right now,
00:20:05.360 I mean, it is appalling when public sector workers are sheltered from the reality that the people who are paying their salaries have to live with every day.
00:20:15.500 And these are tough conversations.
00:20:17.300 But I don't know if Calgary can put off having this conversation for much longer.
00:20:22.040 Well, for us, this wasn't even and still isn't even on the table as something the city is considering.
00:20:29.640 They never presented this as an option.
00:20:32.940 And I have to tell you, they're also planning to still increase city employee salaries year after year for the next four years.
00:20:40.680 They've got agreements in place that they sign with unions and they intend year after year to raise salaries, to raise benefits and to maintain those pensions.
00:20:49.400 And I think for many Calgarians who have faced layoffs, who have faced their own salary cuts,
00:20:56.040 who have faced, you know, not having any form of retirement assistance from their employers,
00:21:01.740 they look at what the benefits the city employees get and the pretty good deal that city employees are getting.
00:21:09.120 And they think during these tough economic times, why am I paying more and more taxes in order to pay for a city workforce that we just can't afford?
00:21:17.400 And to give you a size of the number, the city of Calgary's budget is somewhere between $3.7 and $4 billion a year in total spending.
00:21:28.440 And salaries, wages and benefits is $2 billion of that.
00:21:31.720 So one out of every $2 the city spends is on salaries, wages and benefits.
00:21:36.940 So that is shocking when you put it that way.
00:21:41.780 Do you know if the city of Calgary has seen like a hiring boom?
00:21:45.760 I know we saw that, we see that still in Rachel Notley's government that the, you know,
00:21:51.320 there was a hiring boom in the public sector as soon as she took power and it sort of continued to mushroom and mushroom and mushroom.
00:21:59.840 Did or have you seen that at Calgary City Hall?
00:22:06.100 So right now, because times are so tough, city councils instructed the administration to restrain itself from adding new positions.
00:22:16.120 I don't know if it's a full hiring freeze or, but I do know that that's a message that was sent to the city of Mint.
00:22:22.580 But I can tell you that over that same seven year period from 2010 until 2017, 2,000 more full-time equivalent positions were added to city payroll.
00:22:32.460 So we've added 2,000 more workers over a seven-year period and the amount of money we're paying for the city's bureaucracy has gone up 42%.
00:22:42.920 Neither one of those numbers is sustainable.
00:22:45.300 And I think not only do we need a hiring freeze, we need to take a serious look at how we can reduce the size of the city's workforce while maintaining services,
00:22:56.460 because it's becoming just too costly an operation for taxpayers in Calgary to afford year after year.
00:23:03.200 You know, and there are solutions that aren't scary, but for some reason, public sector unions are so resistant to them.
00:23:11.180 For example, attrition, just not rehiring somebody when they retire and finding ways to streamline or automate their job.
00:23:19.580 In the age of automation, you would think that there would be places, at least in the bureaucracy, that could become automated or, you know, jobs combined.
00:23:29.720 But that doesn't happen in the public sector at all.
00:23:33.940 No, you're absolutely right.
00:23:35.560 You know, we think that these changes should be implemented as kindly as possible, as thoughtfully as possible.
00:23:42.180 We're not calling for, you know, indiscriminate firing and salary cuts.
00:23:46.980 But I think the fact that this isn't even getting talked about, to me, is part of the problem.
00:23:52.000 That City Hall and the admin haven't really wrapped their minds around the fact that we have a structural tax problem now here in Calgary.
00:24:00.280 That some of the people who have been footing the bill year after year just aren't there anymore.
00:24:04.700 And they're not going to come back overnight.
00:24:06.980 And so how are we going to make the city run without those hundreds of millions of dollars in taxes that we used to collect from the downtown towers?
00:24:15.400 For us, we think, look, if you can't have an honest conversation about these issues during a budget cycle, then when on earth can you have these conversations?
00:24:26.200 We're in the middle of a terrible economic slump.
00:24:28.840 Can't we have a conversation about things like transitioning new hires at the city to a defined contribution benefit plan or an RRSP matching plan?
00:24:38.940 Things that you find in the private sector, unlike defined benefit plans, which pay out at the same amount regardless of how much money is in the pension fund.
00:24:47.500 And that number will only escalate.
00:24:50.100 It was, you know, even a few years ago, we were paying out tens of millions of dollars in pension.
00:24:55.500 And now we're paying out hundreds of millions of dollars in pension.
00:24:58.660 And I can only imagine what it's going to be like when, you know, a huge chunk of the city retires and moves on to those pension plans for 10 or 20 or 30 years.
00:25:06.660 It's horrifying.
00:25:09.140 William, I think that's a great place for me to give you a chance to tell people where they can find Safe Calgary, how they can support Safe Calgary, and where they can educate themselves on this information about what exactly it takes to run Calgary City Hall a little bit more efficiently.
00:25:33.360 Well, thanks.
00:25:35.360 And I would say the biggest thing is please visit our website, safecalgary.com.
00:25:40.020 Please come to our Facebook page, facebook.com slash safecalgary.
00:25:44.040 Sign up to our email list.
00:25:45.940 Make sure that you're getting, you know, the other side of the story, the side that isn't being communicated by city administration, by the mayor, by his supportive councillors.
00:25:56.740 You know, there are some hero councillors on this city council.
00:25:59.740 I would say two of our favourites are Jeremy Farkas and Sean Chu, two people who have always tried to do their best for Calgary taxpayers.
00:26:08.840 But that's two out of 13.
00:26:11.260 And so that's not a great ratio.
00:26:13.780 We want to make sure that you know how your tax dollars are being spent and the decisions the city is going to make that will define the future of Calgary for not just the next few years, but for the next few decades.
00:26:25.200 So for us, visit our website, safecalgary.com.
00:26:28.740 Sign up to our email list.
00:26:30.120 Hopefully, you'll enjoy our weekly emails.
00:26:32.040 We try and make them a fun thing for people to read, although sometimes the news is so bad we can't make them that fun.
00:26:39.040 And we're going to be out there trying to offer alternatives.
00:26:41.620 And as we like to describe ourselves, big companies have lobbyists.
00:26:45.640 Special interests have lobbyists.
00:26:47.340 Well, we're the lobbyists for the everyday people.
00:26:49.600 So that's our role.
00:26:51.040 That's how we see our role here at the city.
00:26:52.800 You know, I love that because it is true, especially at the municipal level.
00:27:00.540 There are not a lot of taxpayer advocates out there at the municipal level fighting for accountability and transparency.
00:27:09.220 And all politics are local.
00:27:12.180 If the garbage isn't picked up and your hubcaps are falling off because the pothole in front of your house is that deep,
00:27:19.960 you know, people often don't make that connection between that massive check that you send to the city every year and the disrepair of your community.
00:27:32.120 They don't often make that translation.
00:27:35.200 And I'm glad Safe Calgary exists because you do that for people.
00:27:39.520 And your victory against the city in the Olympics is just a testament to your efficacy.
00:27:46.600 So, you know, keep fighting, William.
00:27:49.180 Well, thank you.
00:27:50.020 We made a joke in our follow-up email that said maybe they were hoping after we won the Olympic thing that we were going to go away.
00:27:56.400 And we pointed out quite clearly, no, we're not going anywhere.
00:27:59.080 We're here for the long term to fight for everyday Calgarians.
00:28:01.800 Well, William, I'm so glad you are.
00:28:04.540 Thank you so much for taking the time, all the time, to come on the show.
00:28:08.260 You have such a valuable role in Calgary.
00:28:12.000 And Calgary and Alberta and Canada really owe Safe Calgary a debt of gratitude for what you pulled off with the Olympics.
00:28:19.180 So thanks for coming on the show.
00:28:20.720 Thanks very much.
00:28:21.440 Always a pleasure to be here.
00:28:22.720 Thanks, William.
00:28:23.240 Thanks, William.
00:28:23.300 Thanks, William.
00:28:31.800 Thanks, William.
00:29:01.800 We'll see you next time.
00:29:31.800 We'll see you next time.