A leaker at the Calgary Sun, Safe injection sites, and pickup truck driving cavemen. We re talking about all the news coming out of Calgary City Hall, and Mayor Naheed Nenshi s refusal to take responsibility for it.
00:07:43.440So, they called his column Dribble, and they said they didn't know why they even bothered sharing it around.
00:07:48.440But in this case, it was a bit special, because the column that was being shared with city bureaucrats had not actually been published by the Calgary Sun yet.
00:07:57.840It was, and it had been written by Rick Bell, presumably shared around the newsroom to everybody who needed to see it.
00:08:05.840But it hadn't been posted online, it hadn't appeared in a newspaper, and it hadn't been emailed out to a media distribution list.
00:08:11.840But the city had it, and the city got a heads up on it from someone at the Sun.
00:08:16.840So, that was a pretty serious leak for the Calgary Sun.
00:08:19.840And certainly, they were quick to say that that did not conform to the journalistic standards expected of Calgary Sun employees.
00:08:53.840We can't get any really more details other than what they shared.
00:08:56.840But I think it's safe to say that given the surprise and dismay expressed by Calgary Sun bigwig, this was not something they were happy about.
00:09:08.840And the question remains, why did whoever leaked the column do it?
00:09:15.840But what we can say is that a city communications staffer named Vicki McGrath, who was the one who shared the column around, had worked for an undisclosed amount of time at the Calgary Sun, presumably in the newsroom, but maybe as an editor.
00:09:29.840And it's possible that she had friends and colleagues still at the Sun who were willing to provide that information to her.
00:09:36.840Why would the person at the Sun do it?
00:09:38.840Well, I think a lot of media people are feeling pressure right now, a lot of cost cutting, a lot of job reductions.
00:09:44.840And as I've pointed out, and as Safe Calgary has pointed out before, a job at the city of Calgary is a pretty sweet gig.
00:09:50.840High salaries, big pensions, platinum benefits, the whole kit and caboodle.
00:09:55.840It's possible someone was trying to curry favour so that down the line they could get a job at the city.
00:10:00.840That's just one theory, but we think it fits.
00:10:02.840You know, I think that that is probably the most likely theory.
00:10:06.840We've seen how many journalists have been sort of gobbled up by Rachel Notley's government over the course of the last three years.
00:10:14.840You know, and media keeps shrinking and they can never really figure out why.
00:10:20.840But this is probably exactly why nobody trusts the media anymore.
00:10:25.840And it makes me wonder just how often and how frequently this happens, like on a grander scale.
00:10:32.840I'm sure it happens with Rachel Notley's government.
00:10:35.840Things being shared from media to them before it even happens, likewise with the federal government.
00:10:40.840I'm sure in some newsrooms it's just a general order of business, but that's just me being a conspiracy theorist.
00:10:49.840I wanted to ask you about Mayor Nenshi, one of my favourite people, probably yours too.
00:11:16.840When discussing Alberta's energy sector, the mayor was talking about how we need to do a better job of selling the work that's been done on the environment.
00:11:25.840Which, of course, I had to stop and laugh at because I think everybody who pays even the slightest bit of attention knows how much Alberta's energy companies have committed to environmental stewardship, environmental protection, and adhering to the most stringent environment regulations on the planet when it comes to energy development and exports.
00:11:46.840So, I don't think we're keeping that a secret.
00:11:49.840I don't think anybody who's ever read a single news article about Alberta's energy sector would come as a surprise to them that they're focused on the environment.
00:11:57.840But the mayor felt that he had to reiterate that point and in doing so said because here in Alberta, we're not all F-350 driving cavemen.
00:12:11.840I mean, I'm not, I'm certain that if he had the opportunity to take that back, he would.
00:12:18.840He will never admit that, of course, because the mayor does not admit when he's wrong.
00:12:23.840But what an insulting thing, of course, to say to the many people in Calgary and outside the city who use F-350s to haul tools, to haul equipment to work sites, who use it because they work in agriculture, they work in the skilled trades, or who, by the way, have to occasionally drive somewhere outside of the city limits.
00:12:44.060And sometimes those roads can get a little bit snowy.
00:12:47.060I mean, maybe the mayor hasn't noticed it's freezing cold right now.
00:12:50.060And sometimes you need a vehicle that can help you get across less than perfect terrain.
00:12:55.060We can't all drive Priuses here in Alberta.
00:12:57.060Yeah, you know, and when your Prius hits the ditch, you're praying to God or whatever deity you pray to for some caveman in an F-350 to drive down that road.
00:13:10.060It echoed Rachel Notley's embarrassing cousin sentiments to me.
00:13:14.060It just felt exactly the same, that there are politicians, unfortunately, our most powerful politicians in this province, who look down their nose at people who work with their back in their hands to build the things we need to be a province and, you know, who feed us.
00:13:33.060And I just, as someone who drives a bigger vehicle than I need most days, I just, I don't want to say I found it offensive, but it really showed Mayor Nenshi for who he really is.
00:13:45.060It feels like the mask slipped for a second.
00:13:48.060I think it's an absolutely condescending statement.
00:13:51.060And, of course, some of us took some pot shots back saying, well, I'm sorry, Your Worship, that we're not all your aristocratic friends at the IOC who like to eat caviar and drink champagne paid for by taxpayers.
00:14:02.060Some of us have to go out and do tough, hard work in order to pay our bills and to make ends meet and to create all of the things that people in cities need, that, you know, your house doesn't drywall itself.
00:14:16.060Your plumbing doesn't repair itself. Your food doesn't grow itself.
00:14:20.060These are all things that have to be done by people and they can't drive smart cars all of the time in order to get it done.
00:14:25.060So absolutely. And if you think about it, so we're now cavemen, embarrassing cousins and sewer rats.
00:14:32.060That's what those of us who support fiscal responsibility appear to now be in the eyes of our city and province elite.
00:14:40.060You know, there's another thing that I see that's going on in Calgary.
00:14:47.060I think it's going on in some of the more progressive cities across the country.
00:14:53.060And now I think it's bleeding into the United States and that those are supervised injection sites.
00:14:59.060And as it's turning out in Calgary, these things are becoming like a black hole that attracts societal problems, whether it's open drug abuse, needles on the ground, open prostitution.
00:15:18.060So in Calgary, it's turning out that all those things that were the supervised injection sites were promised that they would address and alleviate.
00:15:27.060They're actually now being concentrated in these low income neighborhoods and especially neighborhoods that are going out of their way to try to.
00:15:35.060What's the right word gentrify to sort of rebuild themselves and become cute older neighborhoods with bigger yards.
00:15:44.060Now they're just being where everything is being concentrated.
00:15:49.060And I don't like the fact that these neighborhoods are often painted as people who just say not in my backyard.
00:15:57.060But it's certainly not in the more expensive backyards of municipalities.
00:16:03.060And I think there's a reason for that.
00:16:08.060Six or so months ago, Tristan Hopper, who's a journalist out of Edmonton, you know, talked about how he moved to Edmonton.
00:16:15.060And one of the reasons his wife was so happy about the move, she had lived in Vancouver, was the streets weren't strewn with used needles.
00:16:23.060And that was a real selling point to her. And it's why they wanted to raise their kids in a city like Edmonton, because they knew that when their kids were playing in a park or walking to and from school, there wouldn't be the risk of a used, dirty syringe lying on the street that could either pose a problem if they picked it up or just stepped on it.
00:16:42.060And he was lambasted by the politically correct crew who said, oh, you just want to kill drug addicts.
00:16:51.060And Tristan said, no, but I am worried about my community.
00:16:54.060And I'm worried about my family, which, in my opinion, isn't an unreasonable worry for someone to have.
00:17:00.060Now, certainly here in Calgary, we feared that safe injection sites, drug, legalized drug injection sites would result in a spike in crime, would result in property damage, would result in violence, and would result in used needles being found by people of members of the community on their property.
00:17:17.060And it turns out every single one of those things was true.
00:17:20.060A police report that just came out said there's been a 45% increase in break and enter reports.
00:17:27.060There's been a 47% increase in violent crime reports and a whopping 200, nearly 250% increase in reports of drug activity to the police line around the safe injection site.
00:17:44.060There are needles being found on church property grounds.
00:17:47.060There are needles being found on sidewalks, in parks.
00:17:50.060And I ask myself, why did the city not do its due diligence in thinking about, in our Beltline community, which is where this site is located, they have spent a ton of money reinvesting in that community to make it a place where people want to live and work and raise their families.
00:18:06.060New condo construction, new businesses moving in.
00:18:09.060And then they undermine those efforts by putting a safe injection site right in the heart of it with inadequate police and community support to make sure that these issues are dealt with effectively.
00:18:21.060So now the city is left scrambling to come up with an answer to this problem, a problem that they created by rushing to put these sites in without thinking about all of the consequences that have happened in other cities.
00:18:34.060Like, there are lots of other examples that the city of Calgary could have studied and come to the conclusion that this actually doesn't work from a neighborhood impact perspective.
00:18:45.060And from what I understand, the city of Calgary was proposing like a mobile supervised injection site, like a roving needle van.
00:18:57.060You know, they looked at some of the things.
00:19:00.060The mystery machine maybe was something that they were going to consider as an option.
00:19:04.060But to us, I in no way oppose trying to help save lives of people who are deeply afflicted by addiction and illness.
00:19:14.060But I don't think that can be done at the expense of safe communities and safe families.
00:19:20.060And certainly not if you lose the support of the community around the safe injection site, which is what's the case here in Beltline.
00:19:28.060In fact, I'm about 200 meters from the safe injection site in the office that I am broadcasting from.
00:19:35.060And there has been a noticeable increase in vagrancy, in drug dealers who are profiting off the suffering of others.
00:19:43.060And, you know, to me, I just think why rush in to fix part A of the problem, the problem of people overdosing and dying from it, without thinking about parts B, C and D.
00:19:56.060Getting rid of the drug dealers, cutting down on the supply of illegal narcotics, enhancing police safety and police presence and security around these areas so that they don't deteriorate into crime zones.
00:20:08.060And enacting real punishments for people who commit violent and property crime, which is something that destroys all of the work being done to try and revitalize a community like Beltline.
00:20:19.060You know, I feel like there's a broader societal question here, even greater than the municipal one, that you don't want the scourge of this sort of activity in your neighborhoods.
00:20:30.060I don't know when we moved away from getting people clean and productive and happy and contributing to just making sure they stay alive.
00:20:41.060I think that that that isn't good enough. And I think that is the bigotry of low expectations that we're laying on drug users.
00:20:49.060I think that they, too, want to be happy, clean, successful people.
00:20:54.060And I don't think that municipalities should really be enabling the lowest expectation for these folks that are clearly suffering.
00:21:04.060I absolutely agree with you. I actually think it's immoral to allow people to just merely exist in a miserable state of being because they're they're so addicted.
00:21:16.060They're so poor, they're homeless and they have no ability to actually get to a kind of quality of life that we would consider a minimum for people living in a rich affluent society like we're in right now.
00:21:29.060And to to make the claim that 800 lives have been saved.
00:21:33.060Well, OK, they're still living, but I wouldn't say their lives have been saved if they're still homeless and if they're still addicted and if they're still in pain and if they still have mental health issues that have not been addressed.
00:21:45.060That is not saving a life that is prolonging suffering. And I think that is just morally wrong, the wrong standard for us to maintain.
00:21:54.060You know, if you were a family who were who was experiencing drug abuse within the family, oftentimes the advice given to the family is to no longer enable the addict to let them fall down.
00:22:08.060And instead, municipalities are continuing to enable the addict, which is something that we like families would never do.
00:22:15.060And I'm not saying good Lord, you don't want the government to be your family, but I don't think they should play a part in enabling people to, like you said, continue to languish in suffering and pain.
00:22:28.060Now, moving away from such a terrible, terrible, sad topic to a one of fiscal irresponsibility, I wanted to ask you because the Olympic bid or the end of the Olympic bid was one of the greatest successes of Save Calgary, I think, to date.
00:22:49.060And I wanted to know if there are any sort of outstanding financial issues lingering around just how expensive the pursuit of the bid was in the first place, the bid that thankfully never proceeded.
00:23:01.060The bid committee, which is being wound down, has committed to releasing how they spent the million, the 30 million, approximately 30 million that was allocated to them for the bid.
00:23:18.460But one development we do have is that the province has, again, I've said I've rarely ever given Rachel Notley's NDP government credit over their nearly four years in office.
00:23:30.940But when it came to these Olympics, they were the most fiscally responsible government partner in terms of making sure that money was well spent.
00:23:38.180The province has actually asked for their share of the money, of the bid money back, saying, look, it didn't go ahead.
00:23:44.220This was your process. We committed to funding a bid and there was no bid.
00:23:50.120So could we please have the share of Alberta tax dollars that they sent? Could we have it back?
00:23:56.480And the city, of course, is gawking at this request, saying, no, no, we've spent it.
00:24:02.760But how do you spend the money for a bid that never actually proceeds is, I think, a serious question that people have.
00:24:09.940And I'd be interested to know if they did spend the full 30 million, who got that money?
00:24:17.440You know, who who was put on to payroll?
00:24:20.260Which companies were hired to do the printing and the consulting?
00:24:26.540And, you know, the city loves its consultants.
00:24:28.760It has an army of them on contract at all times.
00:24:31.500And I'd like to know for those Olympics, are any of those people people with close ties to either the mayor or to other establishment and elite people at City Hall?
00:24:41.180You know, was this just an exercise to give money to some friends of the political elite here down at City Hall?
00:24:49.540And we're going to wait for that big report to be released.
00:24:52.500And if they don't follow through with that, I guess they, if Calgary, will know what its next next FOIP activity is.
00:24:58.240Well, I mean, if reading government documents is your life and I feel like it's mine some days, I think you're in for a real treat when that report comes out.
00:25:07.780Because I think there are going to be a lot of tentacles to that octopus that I think it's going to be up to Save Calgary to put the pieces together
00:25:17.300and really frame the Olympic bid pursuit for Calgary taxpayers, because I don't think that you're going to get it put into any sort of real context outside of that.
00:25:33.100The money spent was, of course, one resource that the city committed to the Olympic bid.
00:25:39.020And I'm actually going to suggest it wasn't the most important one.
00:25:42.260The other resource it committed was time for the better part of a year.
00:25:48.120This was the focus of our city's senior administration and our city government, City Hall and City Council, to the detriment of everything else.
00:25:57.860All sorts of things were not focused on because the Olympics became the end-all deal.
00:26:03.300As we've talked about before, Calgary homeowners are facing the prospect of a catastrophic increase in their property taxes
00:26:11.840in order to make up for the shortfall of money coming from Calgary's now vacant downtown towers.
00:26:17.840The other group was going to get hit as small businesses.
00:26:20.240This seemed to come as a complete and total surprise to city council, who only looked at the issue briefly at the end of the year.
00:28:46.600But I understand that one city councillor may have asked the city administration several pointed questions about our little Save Calgary group,
00:28:56.520because she has felt kind of under the gun from all of the work that we've done.
00:29:01.780So we're excited that we're causing a little, we're making sitting at the gravy trough a little bit less fun for some of our councillors.
00:29:09.700To support Save Calgary, the best things you can do are go to our website, savecalgary.com, sign up to our weekly email newsletter.
00:29:17.200And then if you like the content that we're putting out, if you believe that the issues that we're raising are important,
00:29:25.080and if you think that there's really no other group out there trying to push fiscal responsibility at City Hall,
00:29:31.600then we hope that you would consider giving us a financial donation through our website so that we can keep doing the FOIPs,
00:29:38.040we can keep covering City Halls, in and out, you know, when they're raising your taxes, or when they're hiking spending,
00:29:44.240or when they're, you know, hiring even more bureaucrats to mismanage our city government.
00:29:49.600These are all things that we try and pay attention to.
00:29:52.540So if you could see your way to giving us a financial donation through our website, savecalgary.com, that would be swell.
00:29:59.920William, I want to thank you so much for coming on the show.
00:30:02.140We can't let it go two months before you come back on the show.
00:30:07.800But I want to thank you for being the, sometimes it feels like the only people standing in between municipal government and taxpayers' wallets.
00:30:17.860So I want to thank you, and I want to tell you to keep fighting.
00:30:36.300As a society, I don't think we give municipal politics the scrutiny and attention it deserves.
00:30:49.920Municipal politics aren't just about fixing potholes and picking up the garbage, although it is true that if neither one of those things happens efficiently or properly, your quality of life is really harmed.
00:31:02.420A bad municipal policy, let's say like supervised injection sites, has the ability to make what is often the average Canadian's single largest investment, their home, worth much, much less.
00:31:16.420And that policy has the ability to make your neighbourhoods much, much more dangerous, nearly instantly.
00:31:23.520I know I say it all the time, but a long time ago, it feels like Conservatives just abandoned the battleground of our local towns and neighbourhoods for provincial and federal politics.
00:31:35.420But if, as Conservatives, we want to change society for the better, we need to start our efforts much closer to home.
00:31:42.480And for that reason, I'm grateful to groups like Safe Calvary for trying to start the conversation.
00:31:47.620I hope they serve as an inspiration that encourages other municipal watchdog groups to pop up all over the country.