Full Comment - Water rationing could be coming to your city next

00:00:00.000 Did you lock the front door?

00:00:04.060 Check.

00:00:04.620 Closed the garage door?

00:00:05.780 Yep.

00:00:06.300 Installed window sensors, smoke sensors, and HD cameras with night vision?

00:00:09.780 No.

00:00:10.620 And you set up credit card transaction alerts, a secure VPN for a private connection,

00:00:14.060 and continuous monitoring for our personal info on the dark web?

00:00:17.080 Uh, I'm looking into it?

00:00:19.600 Stress less about security.

00:00:21.360 Choose security solutions from Telus for peace of mind at home and online.

00:00:25.220 Visit telus.com slash total security to learn more.

00:00:28.800 Conditions apply.

00:00:30.000 Whether you own a bustling hair salon or a hot new bakery,

00:00:34.920 you need business insurance that can keep up with your evolving needs.

00:00:38.780 With flexible coverage options from TD Insurance, you only pay for what you need.

00:00:42.920 TD.

00:00:44.040 Ready for you.

00:00:51.980 One of Canada's biggest cities just doesn't have water right now.

00:00:56.680 Or that's what it seems like I'm hearing and seeing on the news.

00:00:59.740 Hello and welcome to the Full Comment Podcast.

00:01:02.020 My name's Brian Lilly, your host.

00:01:03.860 Calgary is undergoing a major shock to their system after a complete failure of a water main.

00:01:11.240 It's fascinating because it's getting close to tourism season in Calgary.

00:01:16.900 They're going to be having stampede soon.

00:01:19.180 And I can tell you that there's conversations out here in eastern Canada, central Canada,

00:01:23.900 about can you even go to Calgary right now?

00:01:27.340 Don Braid has been covering everything that has been going on with Calgary and its water supply,

00:01:33.020 including getting answers to questions that city officials will not provide.

00:01:37.420 He's been writing about this in the Calgary Herald and joins me now.

00:01:40.900 Don, I know perhaps I've gone over the top in saying Calgary doesn't have water.

00:01:46.300 I get that you do, but give me a sense of the situation.

00:01:50.620 This is almost a month now of you being asked to reduce water supply, major water main breaks.

00:01:58.260 How bad are things?

00:02:00.180 Well, from day to day in the city, they're almost normal, really.

00:02:05.000 I mean, we have to get it.

00:02:06.300 The reality is the rest of the city, apart from the neighborhoods directly affected by this break,

00:02:11.520 have to keep their water use below a certain level.

00:02:14.580 And in that way, the second reservoir in the city can supply the whole city.

00:02:19.200 So here in our place, we have no problem at all.

00:02:22.420 Water flows with the same pressure.

00:02:23.900 The stampede is going on.

00:02:26.180 They're going to truck in non-potable water to deal with the sort of horsey things,

00:02:32.160 like watering down the yards and all that sort of stuff.

00:02:37.380 And there'll be lots of bottled water present.

00:02:39.420 I don't think anybody should not come for a stampede because of this.

00:02:45.500 I mean, we have a major water line break, which is something so new for almost everybody in this country.

00:02:52.300 You can drive a truck through this line, Brian.

00:02:55.540 It's like six meters in diameter.

00:02:59.240 It's a gigantic thing.

00:03:00.420 I mean, we didn't know anything about this stuff.

00:03:02.180 It's been under our feet for decades.

00:03:04.300 In fact, this one's been there since 1975.

00:03:06.320 So when you break a line like that, you've got a major explosion, which, as it happens,

00:03:12.200 is right on the Trans-Canada Highway, 16th Avenue through the northwest of the city,

00:03:17.520 which is the Trans-Canada.

00:03:18.820 Now, you can go around that on bypasses, but it's shut down.

00:03:23.700 The initial neighborhoods that were directly affected, particularly Bonaise, do have water of a sort now.

00:03:30.880 The rest of the city has water as long as we keep our consumption down.

00:03:34.900 So let me ask, if you've got a home or a business right near this break, say, in the Bonaise neighborhood,

00:03:41.820 was there a time when you didn't have water?

00:03:44.280 At the beginning, on the 5th of the month, when the thing popped, no, there was nothing.

00:03:51.300 They got completely shut down.

00:03:52.820 Two neighborhoods, Montgomery and Bonaise, on the west side of the city, were completely without water.

00:03:58.800 That was about the extent, and that was resolved in many ways after a few days, more or less.

00:04:08.360 But that was about the extent of the direct impact on people.

00:04:11.680 Now, you tell people that we might run out of water, they do tend to respond. 0.99

00:04:17.620 And the compliance has been pretty good so far.

00:04:23.500 Although, here's one of the weirdest things.

00:04:26.440 These city workers and their gigantic excavations going on, they found six separate faults.

00:04:32.680 There's a place where the line popped, exploded, literally.

00:04:36.500 And then there's five other places where they have to replace pipe.

00:04:40.900 And they have to bring in gigantic sections of steel pipe.

00:04:44.200 The pipeline has been coming, pipe has been coming from San Diego.

00:04:48.200 The people of San Diego had happened to have some of the right diameter and the right type to send.

00:04:53.280 So we've been getting that from San Diego.

00:04:55.120 And they arrive with little messages written on them.

00:04:59.340 I saw that.

00:05:01.340 I saw that.

00:05:02.400 It reminded me of, you know, World War II, guys writing messages on the bombs before they dropped.

00:05:08.520 But these were friendly messages.

00:05:09.900 These were friendly.

00:05:12.500 So you describe this pipe that you can literally drive a truck through.

00:05:19.440 I didn't realize it was that big.

00:05:21.860 But 1975, that's not that old.

00:05:26.800 When I lived in Ottawa, when I covered Parliament Hill, I remember them having to replace water pipes below the city streets.

00:05:34.940 That it turns out had been, well, they were made of wood.

00:05:38.700 And Sir John A.

00:05:39.620 MacDonald had literally been there for their installation.

00:05:43.600 And those didn't fail.

00:05:45.720 And you're talking about a concrete pipe from the 1970s failing.

00:05:51.540 What happened?

00:05:52.220 Well, just to set the stage for that, the other reservoir here has pipe that's been working for 92 years without anything but minor failures, occasional gaskets and stuff like that.

00:06:05.900 That pipe, according to one guy who's very familiar with this system that worked on all this stuff for years, he said you could take a diamond cutter to that pipe and you'd have trouble getting through it.

00:06:17.520 It is so dense and so non-porous.

00:06:20.240 The problem with this pipe that started coming out in the mid, so literally, 92 years without a big leak of any kind.

00:06:29.000 That's where we're getting our water from now.

00:06:31.440 This pipe that was made from the 1950s to the 1990s was made with more porous concrete.

00:06:40.300 That sounds bad for a water pipe.

00:06:42.840 It really does, you know, but everybody thought it was just fine, but it turns out that it's very susceptible to chemical corrosion.

00:06:52.700 You know, one of the guys that I spoke to put it this way.

00:06:55.440 He said the stuff that's really bad for these pipes is topsoil, the stuff that's great in your garden.

00:07:03.100 Farmers call it great topsoil.

00:07:04.680 We call it toxic waste, certain chloride sulfides and chemicals like that.

00:07:09.200 I saw your headline and your column on that, and I thought, how on earth is topsoil in my garden going to ruin a water pipe?

00:07:19.760 This is a very, very good question, but it does, because the sulfides and chlorides and salt and things like that, as one other guy said, almost anything in the periodic table is bad for a pipeline.

00:07:31.880 With the ideal location for these pipelines, the ones that have this more porous kind of concrete, what they really need is sand and gravel around them.

00:07:42.800 And that's the crazy thing about this huge break, because these pipes like to be in sand and gravel, which does not corrode.

00:07:49.280 And so that's why they never expect a break like this anywhere near a riverbed, because that's the kind of soil you get near a riverbed.

00:07:57.500 This break is near a riverbed.

00:08:00.300 So at this point, I'm guessing, I think I've learned a lot, but I'm guessing.

00:08:04.280 I'm guessing that loads of other kind of stuff were poured over it.

00:08:09.160 Construction went on. 1.00

00:08:10.140 People forgot all about the damn thing. 0.98

00:08:11.680 It's just got water under there. 0.98

00:08:12.980 And then gradually, over time, some of these chemicals seeped down to the pipe, and not just in one place, Brian, but in six different places.

00:08:23.680 Now, the other five places haven't leaked, but they still have to replace the pipe because of this.

00:08:30.560 How long is all of this going to take?

00:08:33.480 Well, it's supposed to be right now, perhaps for publicity reasons as much as anything,

00:08:39.000 they're saying that the worst will be over, and the lines could be functioning by July the 5th,

00:08:44.380 which is the opening day of Stampede, as it happens.

00:08:48.460 They're saying it's not entirely a sure thing, but they could well be back in full service.

00:08:57.460 Once they've got the stuff connected, filled in, they have to flush things out.

00:09:04.760 In fact, some city workers have been harassed because when people have seen them flushing out lines,

00:09:10.380 which is something they have to do to do this work, but they've been harassed for wasting water.

00:09:16.100 But they have to, once they get this stuff buried, or at least once they get it installed,

00:09:21.840 they have to do a lot of work checking the safety of the water, a lot of testing, so that could take days.

00:09:27.820 But they think that they might have it back in full service by July 5th.

00:09:31.760 Has the city ordered a review of the rest of their system,

00:09:38.260 given that it sounds like this kind of pipe was used over several decades?

00:09:43.720 Is there a worry that, okay, well, we'll get this fixed,

00:09:48.340 but either along this water main or elsewhere, more things are going to pop, as you say?

00:09:57.040 Sure, and it's not just Calgary that should be concerned about this.

00:10:00.400 Pretty well every major city in Canada has got some pipe of this type.

00:10:05.620 This one was installed in 1975.

00:10:08.840 It was supposed to have a lifespan of 100 years, and this is 50, right?

00:10:13.220 One guy says if you have it in absolutely the right condition, sand and gravel and so forth,

00:10:18.580 they could last 200 years.

00:10:20.720 So this is not, you know, we're getting to the stage, apparently,

00:10:24.980 where this corrosion is happening, and I don't think it's just happening here in Calgary.

00:10:31.400 A hundred or 200 years, and immediately I thought of the aqueducts.

00:10:35.880 Right.

00:10:36.540 You know, they've lasted thousands.

00:10:39.800 You made the point about wooden ones.

00:10:42.280 My brother-in-law in Edmonton was telling me that there's some construction work going on near him

00:10:48.920 where they're putting in a distribution line in a much smaller neighborhood line,

00:10:52.500 and they actually found a wooden pipe that still had water in it and was still flowing somewhere.

00:10:59.200 It's amazing what worked in the past, and now this is falling apart.

00:11:04.860 Or there's been an attempt to try and say, well, it's the current mayor's fault.

00:11:11.840 No, it's the former mayor's fault.

00:11:13.200 Well, it's this party.

00:11:15.960 I've seen some finger-pointing, and granted, I'm following this from afar.

00:11:20.460 I'm not in it the way you are.

00:11:22.180 But to me, this is not a partisan issue or a partisan fault.

00:11:31.460 It's probably more of a structural one in terms of the bureaucrats and the people in charge

00:11:38.760 weren't monitoring this properly.

00:11:42.180 But is there a lot of political finger-pointing trying to blame different politicians,

00:11:46.900 whether it be Mayor Gondek or anyone else?

00:11:49.800 Yes.

00:11:50.160 And that's one reason for that, is because two days, three days from now,

00:11:56.040 the new Democratic Party will vote on the new leader.

00:11:58.940 The person expected to win is Nahid Nenshi, who, of course, was the mayor from 2010 to 21.

00:12:07.480 Oh, well, then let's blame him.

00:12:09.180 Yeah, a lot of people are saying, yeah, it's his fault.

00:12:12.100 Other people are saying it's Rachel Notley's fault, although she was the premier, not the mayor.

00:12:17.000 And, of course, there's a lot of blame going the other way.

00:12:20.160 So there's a political element.

00:12:22.580 And for the moment, as usually happens in a crisis in this country,

00:12:25.880 the parties say, hey, you know, Gondek started this by trying to blame the province for our mayor,

00:12:31.980 Jody Gondek, tried to blame the province for not providing adequate funding, 0.51

00:12:37.540 to which Premier Daniel Smith immediately said, well, you never asked for any damn money to replace 0.61

00:12:42.220 these lines or even repair them.

00:12:45.380 And then that sort of blew up.

00:12:47.280 And then very quickly, the mayor realized that this is not the moment for that sort of thing.

00:12:53.400 And they've been cooperating and collaborating very well.

00:12:55.820 And by pure chance, the province passed a bill in this session giving them the power to completely take over any emergency response

00:13:06.520 from any municipality in the province should they decide the municipality is really screwing it up.

00:13:11.700 They won't have to invoke that, I don't think.

00:13:15.080 But it still is a little club they've got.

00:13:17.840 So that if things don't go well, if by July 5th it's still going sideways, they can step in and take over.

00:13:27.140 So hypothetically, they could take over, but it's more of a, you know, a bit of a paper threat,

00:13:34.660 but it's still something the city has to consider for sure.

00:13:37.100 I don't think there's any sign of that.

00:13:38.340 Actually, the city of Calvary has pretty good emergency response.

00:13:41.720 We've been through one of the biggest floods in Canadian history here, so they've had a lot of practice.

00:13:48.320 I remember going out to cover that.

00:13:50.280 And still the images, and I got there a week or two after, and the images of what it was like are burned into my brain.

00:14:04.460 The city should have known, and you write about this in one of your columns,

00:14:10.440 that they should have known about trouble because of something that happened in January of 2004.

00:14:17.380 There was a smaller line in an area called McKnight Boulevard that went,

00:14:24.700 and that caused, you know, all kinds of local consternation.

00:14:28.580 But why do you say that should have told the city, hey, you've got to look into this?

00:14:34.600 Well, it was in an area where nothing like this was expected because they thought it was in the right kind of soil.

00:14:41.520 So when this popped on McKnight Boulevard on a day when it was almost minus 40,

00:14:48.400 and there was, you know, rivers with boats in them and it quickly turned to ice,

00:14:54.700 when they dug down, what they discovered was corrosion of the same kind.

00:15:00.920 And the corrosion was clearly coming from the soil.

00:15:03.480 They didn't expect anything like this here just as they didn't expect it in the one we're experiencing now.

00:15:08.300 And one of the engineers who was on the spot that day told me that what they discovered

00:15:15.600 was a line of clay running diagonally and touching the pipe at a certain point.

00:15:22.560 And the clay was moist, as clay tends to be, and that kind of tends to absorb bad chemicals.

00:15:28.440 And that's why the line popped, because of that one thing.

00:15:32.260 And, you know, as I said, these things were installed long ago,

00:15:36.740 and I don't think anybody's out there guarding them to make sure nobody puts the wrong soil

00:15:42.020 or a load of road salt or something on top of it.

00:15:45.940 And there you go.

00:15:47.500 But they had to have known that there was clay in that area then.

00:15:53.240 I mean, you're digging through, you would see there was clay.

00:15:56.080 You'd think so.

00:15:57.180 I think at that point...

00:15:58.560 It's not something that's easy to move.

00:16:00.320 No, but at that point, it wasn't really understood how susceptible these lines were to corrosion.

00:16:09.900 That's my understanding from talking to the people who were quite garrulous about it,

00:16:14.500 because they're no longer under city secrecy rules,

00:16:18.060 that they didn't really understand how susceptible they were.

00:16:21.960 So Calgary is a booming city.

00:16:25.200 It's building out.

00:16:26.560 You say these pipes were used from, what did you say, 1955 to 1990-something?

00:16:33.080 Yeah.

00:16:33.780 What are they building as you put up new neighborhoods?

00:16:37.440 Well, that's a really good question, and people are asking it at this moment

00:16:42.180 for the reason that they've just passed blanket zoning in Calgary,

00:16:45.840 as almost every other Canadian city is doing.

00:16:48.320 There's tremendously controversial here.

00:16:50.300 And, of course, that means more dwellings.

00:16:53.540 It means more density.

00:16:54.760 It means more need for water.

00:16:56.520 It needs more strain on the existing pipes.

00:16:58.660 And people are saying, well, how, you know, like,

00:17:01.040 how can you go ahead with your blanket zoning plan

00:17:03.760 when we now have doubts about the water supply?

00:17:06.380 They should have built...

00:17:07.820 This is getting really, you know, Calgary-centric and technical,

00:17:11.920 but they should have built another north line into the north side of the city long ago. 0.52

00:17:18.400 And they've tried it a couple of times, but they never quite got it going.

00:17:22.880 But how do you serve all these new things that federal money is enabling with their,

00:17:29.180 I forget the name of this housing incentive program, how do you serve them?

00:17:34.420 How do you serve those neighborhoods?

00:17:35.900 The question is, maybe you really can't with what we've got now.

00:17:39.140 But are we still using, and the answer would be similar in Toronto or Vancouver or elsewhere,

00:17:47.500 cities are probably using very similar pipe.

00:17:50.480 Are we still using pipe that is susceptible to this type of corrosion and breaking

00:17:55.120 when it comes into contact with topsoil or clay?

00:17:59.120 Yeah, right.

00:18:00.020 It's, you know, since 1990s, like this was tightened up in the 1990s.

00:18:04.760 There are two issues.

00:18:06.260 There's kind of a false flag floating around,

00:18:09.300 because there's an article in a UK magazine, which is really very good,

00:18:13.120 called PipelineRepair.UK.

00:18:16.380 And it talked about...

00:18:17.460 There's a publication for everything.

00:18:19.860 There really is.

00:18:20.860 We're really getting down in the weeds here.

00:18:22.420 But this article pointed out that in around about 1970,

00:18:27.640 pipeline makers decided that steel technology had progressed so far

00:18:33.480 that they could use less steel reinforcing wire.

00:18:36.740 Now, the way these things work is there's a concrete sleeve that surrounds us all.

00:18:40.680 That's the porous concrete we're talking about.

00:18:42.500 Inside of that, there's all this reinforcing wire that's also essential.

00:18:48.980 And that's...

00:18:49.680 The city officials here are saying these wires just started popping.

00:18:53.540 Well, they started popping because the concrete melted, right?

00:18:56.620 But in the States, there was the use of...

00:19:01.600 That they started in the 1970s of less wire led to all kinds of trouble.

00:19:08.240 In California, Washington, D.C., they all had major blowouts.

00:19:12.280 And from my understanding, though, is that's not the problem here,

00:19:15.200 because we, at least in Calgary,

00:19:17.720 the pipe that we bought back then to install this line was made in Canada,

00:19:21.860 but still in St. Eustache, Quebec, as a matter of fact.

00:19:24.800 And it was still up to the old wire standard.

00:19:28.280 So the problem isn't the wire, even though the city keeps trying to say it is.

00:19:33.360 The problem is the concrete.

00:19:35.660 Hmm.

00:19:36.560 Bad concrete.

00:19:37.400 And that concrete standards were changed and improved and tightened up after 1990.

00:19:42.160 So any newer lines have probably got a better chance.

00:19:44.520 All right, we're going to take a quick break.

00:19:47.500 But when we come back, Don, you've covered politics, especially municipal level, for a long time.

00:19:53.420 I want to pull the conversation back from Calgary and talk about it on the wider scale of

00:19:59.140 municipalities just don't like fixing the stuff beneath our feet.

00:20:04.400 We'll talk about that when we come back.

00:20:06.020 When I found out my friend got a great deal on a wool coat from Winners, I started wondering,

00:20:11.800 is every fabulous item I see from Winners?

00:20:14.880 Like that woman over there with the designer jeans. 1.00

00:20:17.620 Are those from Winners?

00:20:19.140 Ooh, or those beautiful gold earrings?

00:20:21.620 Did she pay full price?

00:20:22.960 Or that leather tote?

00:20:23.980 Or that cashmere sweater?

00:20:25.200 Or those knee-high boots?

00:20:26.640 That dress?

00:20:27.420 That jacket?

00:20:28.100 Those shoes?

00:20:29.120 Is anyone paying full price for anything?

00:20:32.060 Stop wondering.

00:20:33.340 Start winning.

00:20:33.900 Winners find fabulous for less.

00:20:36.760 Municipal governments, no matter where you live, love to talk about how they don't have

00:20:41.060 the right money for infrastructure.

00:20:42.700 For years, we've heard about the infrastructure deficit.

00:20:46.120 The Federation of Canadian Municipalities is constantly telling provincial and federal governments

00:20:51.140 that they need to give them more money.

00:20:54.080 Don, I want to start there because we've heard those cries by municipal leaders for years.

00:21:00.680 But in my experience covering politics at all levels, municipal leaders don't like fixing

00:21:08.020 the things beneath our ground.

00:21:09.500 Fixing a water main is not nearly as sexy as putting up something new and shiny that you

00:21:14.220 can get your photo taken next to and into the local community newspaper.

00:21:19.180 Absolutely.

00:21:19.980 And that's exactly what happened in this case.

00:21:21.920 They knew after 2004, we already talked about that, that they had to do a lot of inspecting.

00:21:29.640 In fact, they immediately established a whole unit at City Hall to do nothing but inspect

00:21:34.820 these pipelines because they knew there was trouble ahead, right?

00:21:38.960 They must have had some indications from things that had happened elsewhere that there was

00:21:45.280 potential trouble.

00:21:46.300 In fact, in 2007, the very line that we're missing now because it popped, they shut it

00:21:53.300 down completely and inspected it fully.

00:21:56.960 And they could do that in those days because there were many few people on Calgary and you

00:22:00.940 could still supply the city almost even without telling them that this is what you're doing.

00:22:06.000 Can't do that now.

00:22:07.240 So they have not, not only have they not properly inspected it, but some of the inspection they

00:22:14.020 did, called acoustic testing, missed five problems with this line.

00:22:20.300 But that's exactly right.

00:22:21.880 They wait until the crisis comes and then there's an uproar and then they call for funding.

00:22:27.300 They say they're continuing to call for funding, but they haven't called for it for this purpose,

00:22:31.020 right, here in the city, probably nowhere else either.

00:22:33.880 Um, but I think exactly right.

00:22:38.360 And they're not the only ones to do that.

00:22:39.880 Of course, provinces tend to be a little, uh, crisis, uh, oriented when it comes to funding

00:22:45.140 as well.

00:22:46.880 So you've been talking to the engineers, you've been talking to their, well, retired engineers,

00:22:51.980 the, the guys who, um, are, are blowing the whistle.

00:22:55.900 What are they telling you in terms of what the city's doing, right?

00:22:59.120 What they've missed, what they should have done.

00:23:02.820 What's the story?

00:23:03.880 Well, they should have done more testing.

00:23:07.420 They should have found a way to test this line.

00:23:10.800 Uh, they, um, they, they're not saying that they haven't done a lot of things that were.

00:23:17.940 In fact, they do say that this city, because of what happened in 2004, has more aggressive

00:23:23.420 testing than most other Canadian cities of these lines.

00:23:26.380 And of course, there are, in neighborhoods, there are hundreds of little pops every year.

00:23:30.440 That's kind of expected.

00:23:32.440 Um, and, uh, so there's lots of inspection done.

00:23:35.560 But the question becomes, in this case, why, after having been aware of what the problem

00:23:41.980 was, why they missed this one.

00:23:44.440 So, it, it's a major, a major failure in, in the system somewhere, for sure.

00:23:50.500 And, and really, you know, you asked me earlier, Brian, what, uh, uh, study being done.

00:23:55.840 Well, I initially called, said there should be a full independent study.

00:23:59.940 I don't know what I was thinking.

00:24:01.680 Because now they say there will be a full independent study, and they can't talk about

00:24:05.640 anything until it's done.

00:24:06.820 Well, what do you, you know, what they're like.

00:24:08.960 Probably in this, you know, so I deeply regret having called for a full and independent study,

00:24:14.020 because it'll be months and months, maybe years before we actually hear anything.

00:24:18.580 And I remember, uh, covering Paul Martin cover, uh, announcing the 2004 federal election.

00:24:25.380 And all three of the big issues were either before, uh, an inquiry or the courts.

00:24:31.120 And so he couldn't talk about any of them.

00:24:33.940 And that's what politicians love.

00:24:36.400 Yeah.

00:24:36.720 So there, there was a, uh, a committee meeting the other day that where some

00:24:43.620 councillors were, were being aggressive and kind of rubbed the mayor and, and other city

00:24:49.640 officials the wrong way, didn't it?

00:24:50.860 Because these councillors wanted answers.

00:24:53.120 Did they get them?

00:24:54.620 No.

00:24:55.440 Uh, this councillors are, uh, there's another interesting thing happening here because the

00:24:59.760 province is enabling civic political parties.

00:25:03.160 And by next year's election in the fall of 25 of all munis in, in Alberta, uh, uh, political

00:25:10.220 parties will be allowed.

00:25:11.540 Now there's a cadre of seven councillors who were conservative, very much opposed, uh, will

00:25:18.620 be definitely UFC, uh, affiliated, if not UCP rather, United Conservative Party affiliated,

00:25:25.620 if not actually named, uh, going into this election.

00:25:28.900 So these people tend to, tend to really ask a lot of hard questions and get very few answers

00:25:35.420 because it really is a pitched battle between the conservatives, the, the UCP leaners and

00:25:41.400 the progressives, uh, the NDP or liberal leaners on council.

00:25:47.060 It's, um, interesting that you're going that way by British Columbia.

00:25:50.280 They already have that.

00:25:51.060 Quebec has that.

00:25:52.060 We don't have it in Ontario, but we should, because we all know, you know, I, I know that

00:25:57.160 Olivia Chow, mayor of Toronto was a new Democrat, you know, that Jody Gondek is a new Democrat,

00:26:03.300 you know, he doesn't take a lot to figure it out.

00:26:06.080 So why not just be straight up?

00:26:07.520 Well, I was going to say that, uh, one thing I've always felt is that when you vote for

00:26:11.400 a council, you really don't know what you're getting.

00:26:13.400 If they have part, if they're part of a party platform, at least you know what platform

00:26:17.840 you're voting for.

00:26:18.820 That, that alone suggests that there's not the, not the worst idea to have political

00:26:23.620 parties.

00:26:24.500 You wrote early on in this crisis that, um, you, you wrote favorably of the mayor and

00:26:31.940 said, one thing you can say for sure is she doesn't run and hide that she was out front

00:26:36.100 on this.

00:26:37.480 Is that still the case or with your comments about, um, people not getting answers, uh,

00:26:45.100 is she backing away from, from being as upfront as, as you appreciated early on?

00:26:50.820 Well, I don't think they're being nearly as upfront as they should be, but I think the

00:26:53.940 mayor, as in any, any crisis can be an opportunity.

00:26:57.320 The mayor has taken a tremendous pounding over, over a number of issues and are declaring

00:27:01.940 a climate crisis, uh, the, the, the bylaw, the crazy bylaw against paper bags that they

00:27:09.060 tried to bring in.

00:27:09.880 She's taken a huge pounding for months.

00:27:11.900 And then all of a sudden there's this opportunity to be on TV, uh, on YouTube and everything

00:27:17.600 every single day, talking directly to the voters.

00:27:20.800 And, and she's a good presenter.

00:27:22.400 She comes across very well.

00:27:24.080 And so there is a chance that she can redeem herself.

00:27:28.060 Um, and, and a lot of people looking at her might say, well, what's all the fuss about?

00:27:32.300 I think she's okay.

00:27:33.860 Uh, you know, Ninchy was, she was up for a recall, wasn't she?

00:27:37.880 She was.

00:27:38.420 And it, it, uh, actually got quite a lot of votes.

00:27:40.980 There was no way it was ever going to succeed, but it was a formal recall under provincial

00:27:44.800 legislation, a formal recall petition under provincial legislation.

00:27:49.040 And then when the city people looked at the ballots, they decided that all of them were

00:27:53.220 invalid.

00:27:55.200 That's a fact.

00:27:56.380 They, it's the technicality because you're supposed to have some document that comes with

00:28:01.060 every ballot because it wasn't there.

00:28:02.600 They ruled that every single vote against you on deck was invalid.

00:28:07.460 Did, but they didn't have enough votes to recall. 0.94

00:28:09.560 No, it never would have worked anyway.

00:28:11.620 Okay.

00:28:12.380 So she's gone from, uh, the point of, uh, you know, a large number of people wanting

00:28:18.980 or gone to, as you say, using this as, as an opportunity.

00:28:22.660 Um, do you, you know, do you think folks that aren't plugged into city hall politics, uh,

00:28:29.300 all the time, we might call them low information voters or that, are they going to turn in,

00:28:33.500 as you say, um, feel like, okay, she's doing a good job.

00:28:37.260 It's kind of what happened to Doug Ford during the pandemic here in Ontario.

00:28:40.720 I think there's a chance of that, but the longer this goes on, uh, the, the less chance there

00:28:48.480 is.

00:28:48.740 I mean, eventually people, it's like COVID, right?

00:28:51.260 Remember the beginning of COVID when most people were saying, oh yeah, maybe I better

00:28:54.840 do that.

00:28:55.340 And then as the thing wore on, uh, whole, whole careers were ruined.

00:28:59.660 Uh, just ask Jason Kenney.

00:29:01.700 Uh, you know, so this is a very minor way of a little bit like that.

00:29:06.160 If it goes on and on and check, and they're terrified of, tell you this too, Brian, they're

00:29:09.980 terrified of imposing too many restrictions because of the reaction that's still very

00:29:16.060 strong here about COVID response.

00:29:17.940 It's really easy to, to provoke the anti, uh, you know, freedom crowd, freedom crowd again

00:29:25.460 over any kind of government restriction.

00:29:27.960 And at, at beginning, at the beginning of this thing, there was a group that were sort

00:29:31.600 of a group of gardeners who were refusing to saying, there's no way we're going to let

00:29:35.840 the city take away our freedom to water our plants.

00:29:39.980 Um, uh, you know, so, so they, they've done it.

00:29:43.420 They've declared this local state of emergency and, uh, and, but they're going really easy

00:29:49.040 on being tough on, on violations.

00:29:51.800 Uh, it, it's funny, the reaction that has come out of COVID because I, people I know who

00:29:57.680 were very compliant, at least at the beginning, uh, now bristle at any thought of, of restrictions.

00:30:05.260 It, it, it's, um, it's, it's like a, a, a nervous, uh, twitch, uh, and, and instant, you

00:30:13.160 know, backup on, on such things.

00:30:15.020 Uh, you've, um, you've had some odd, uh, you know, requests from city hall though, uh, in

00:30:25.540 terms of, uh, even things like flushing, um, which I saw a lot of mockery about that,

00:30:31.660 but, um, uh, have they at least found a humorous way to, to deal with this?

00:30:37.320 Not particularly, but some of it does make you laugh.

00:30:40.180 Like, uh, getting instructions from the mayor on how to shower, you know, if you get in

00:30:44.460 the shower, get yourself wet, turn the shower off, soap yourself up, uh, turn the water back

00:30:50.340 on, wash the soap off, exit shower kind of thing.

00:30:54.400 And we learned that, uh, if what people, uh, families flush one fewer time per day, we'll

00:31:01.840 save 12 million liters of water every single day.

00:31:06.080 Um, and so there's all kinds of advice coming out that, uh, can sound comical, at least at

00:31:12.760 first.

00:31:13.620 Yeah.

00:31:14.460 Yeah.

00:31:14.840 Uh, I saw the color coded flushing guide being shared online.

00:31:18.840 Oh yeah.

00:31:20.120 I hope that you guys do get through this, uh, sooner rather than later, but this is a cautionary

00:31:25.780 tale for municipalities across the country, probably across the continent to, to start

00:31:30.600 looking at the infrastructure and not neglecting it.

00:31:33.280 That's for sure.

00:31:34.700 All right, Don, thank you very much for the time today.

00:31:36.940 Thanks a lot, Brian.

00:31:37.820 Bye.

00:31:38.360 Full comment is a post media podcast.

00:31:40.800 My name's Brian Lilly, your host.

00:31:42.340 This episode was produced by Andre Proulx.

00:31:44.400 Theme music by Bryce Hall.

00:31:46.480 Kevin Libin is the executive producer.

00:31:48.540 Remember you can subscribe to full comment anywhere you get your podcast, Apple, Spotify,

00:31:53.360 Amazon, wherever you get that, uh, help us out by leaving us a rating, giving us a review.

00:31:58.720 Tell your friends about us.

00:32:00.100 Thanks for listening until next time.

00:32:01.820 I'm Brian Lilly.

00:32:02.560 I'm-

00:32:03.560 who-

00:32:14.280 you

00:32:15.900 yeah.

00:32:16.840 you

00:32:18.740 yeah.

Full Comment - June 24, 2024

Water rationing could be coming to your city next

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript