Western Standard - June 13, 2024


Municipal government overreach has left core services in a mess

Mentioned
Jody Gondek Danielle Smith Rocket Space Trudeau Bridges
CMS： Live from the floor of the Global Energy Show ‘The Missing Tax Report’

Episode Stats


Length

5 minutes

Words per minute

204.9

Word count

1,202

Sentence count

78

Harmful content

Misogyny

4

sentences flagged

Toxicity

4

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

On June 6th, a water main break hit a critical point in the city of Calgary, leaving millions of people without water. Mayor Jodie Gondek tried to blame Premier Danielle Smith, but it was actually the fault of her own government.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 For people in the Calgary area that on the morning of June 6th, all of us probably remember,
00:00:04.960 nothing huge and tragic, but an emergency alert came out. You know, that emergency sound comes
00:00:09.220 on your phones, it's on the radio, it's on TV. Everybody, we're talking millions of people in
00:00:13.660 Calgary and area. We're told that water supply levels had hit a critical level and people
00:00:18.000 shouldn't wash dishes or even shower or try to even put off flushing the toilet for fear of
00:00:24.080 running out of water. Yeah, that's what they were warning us in the emergency alert. Because there
00:00:27.900 was a water main break in North Calgary and apparently it was so bad that even outlying
00:00:31.560 towns from the city were placed under emergency water restrictions. Now, questions were quickly
00:00:37.120 asked, of course. I mean, how is it that over one and a half million people are dependent upon a
00:00:41.360 single line for their water supply? What caused the break? How long is it going to be before people
00:00:46.320 could use their water normally again, which they still aren't by now? The city of Calgary didn't
00:00:50.540 have too many details to offer. And then everyone to try and expand upon her already massive personal
00:00:56.680 unpopularity among Calgarians. Mayor Jody Gondek came on out and held a press conference that offered
00:01:02.120 few details on what happened. But she took the opportunity to try and blame the mess on Premier
00:01:06.660 Smith. Gondek, of course, was slammed by the local media and other people and citizens on the weekend
00:01:11.660 because she, I mean, it was just beyond the pale. But on the weekend, she did something really rare for
00:01:16.800 Gondek. She offered a rare apology for her terrible communications at a time of crisis. Gondek's not much
00:01:21.680 one for apologizing. It really wasn't a time when Calgarians wanted to hear the mayor trying to take
00:01:27.400 cheap shots at the provincial government. It doesn't help that whenever Gondek does anything,
00:01:31.280 it looks like she's got a mouth full of poop. She really despises talking to you guys, and it shows. 1.00
00:01:35.920 So either way, whose fault is the water crisis? Well, Mayor Gondek isn't directly and personally
00:01:40.800 responsible. But this mess lands fully in the lap of Calgary's city hall. I mean, it isn't Trudeau's fault.
00:01:46.520 Lots of things are. It isn't Smith's fault. Responsibility lands with the city. And Gondek,
00:01:52.340 for better or worse, usually worse, is at the helm right now. The city of Calgary, I mean,
00:01:56.860 they've had surpluses over $200 million a year. Yeah, they've been overtaxing everybody by that
00:02:01.700 much. They have a contingency fund of over $4 billion. So how is it that a city awash in so much
00:02:08.280 money can't fill the bloody potholes in the streets or maintain a reliable source of water? Well,
00:02:14.060 it's because Calgary, like most other cities, has allowed their politicians and administration to
00:02:18.180 drift way out of their designated lanes. Cities are wasting time and resources on countless projects
00:02:23.500 that aren't within their jurisdiction, while they ignore the obligations that land within
00:02:27.480 municipal jurisdiction. I mean, Calgary's wasted time and money on everything from, what, failed
00:02:32.160 Olympic bids, subsidizing ridiculous business startups. Remember Rocket Space? Spending $4.8 million
00:02:37.280 for a three-word slogan. Hideous public art installations, woke social engineering initiatives,
00:02:44.480 banning paper bags. That was a brilliant one, wasn't it? And of course, Gondek's $87 billion
00:02:49.780 climate change plan. None of these things should be in the domain of a municipal government.
00:02:54.780 Municipal politicians, though, they're driven by vanity. And every one of them wants to lay claim
00:02:58.680 to a legacy for their time in office. Bridges, roads, water pipes, those are boring. They want to cut
00:03:03.280 the ribbons for exciting new expenditures, whether the city needs them or not. Unfortunately, of course,
00:03:07.900 it means they're ignoring the important stuff. Calgary's far from alone. It's happening in cities
00:03:13.040 and towns across the province and likely across the country. That's what inspired Premier Daniel
00:03:18.300 Smith and her government to create legislation giving the provincial government more powers to 0.94
00:03:22.860 intervene when a municipal government goes off the rails. The province always had those powers,
00:03:27.420 but now they're more clarified. Now, the overreach of municipal governments shouldn't be brought in
00:03:31.680 to check for expanding the reach of another level of government, however. I don't like that.
00:03:35.960 The only way to correct, actually, the bloated, large, inefficient civil governments is for citizens 0.98
00:03:40.740 to get off their asses at election time and start firing their mayors and councils. Part of what 0.96
00:03:45.660 created the apathy and cynicism among the electorate has been what they fire one mayor or councillor who
00:03:51.000 misrepresented themselves on the way into the office. They end up electing another one who misrepresents
00:03:54.980 themselves on the way in. Well, with the political party system coming into place, it's going to be
00:03:59.780 harder for faux conservatives and faux common sense people to slip by the electorate as they used to
00:04:03.580 be because they're going to have to go through a nomination. Nobody in Calgary campaigned on a
00:04:07.880 massive climate change plan, paper bag bans, and spending millions on three-word slogans. Yet that's
00:04:12.760 what the city got when this latest crop of councillors came in with Mayor Gondek. The mandate for
00:04:17.400 municipalities is pretty basic. They exist to provide road and water infrastructure, some policing,
00:04:21.840 fire services, taking care of the trash, and a small degree of municipal bylaws and zoning to
00:04:28.000 ensure neighbours get along. So far, the city of Calgary is doing a terrible job on all those top
00:04:32.140 priorities, even though they're constantly increasing taxes. The mayor and council, they're 0.64
00:04:36.040 constantly distracted with personal vanity projects and virtue signaling while they ignore the basic
00:04:40.620 needs of the city. Meanwhile, the civil service continues to bloat while delivering worse services
00:04:45.920 every year. Sometimes solutions can be simple. Calgary and other municipalities have to replace
00:04:52.040 their mayors and councillors with common sense candidates, and they get the chance in a little more
00:04:56.200 than a year. The contenders need to campaign on going back to the basics. Unlike their predecessors,
00:05:01.380 though, they have to mean it. Citizens have the power to reduce the taxes and reduce the overreach
00:05:05.920 and improve their basic services, but they need to exercise it and effectively. So yeah, with political
00:05:10.680 parties holding candidates to account before they even reach a ballot, I'm tentatively optimistic
00:05:14.760 that municipalities in Alberta are about to experience a mass change and hopefully for the better.
00:05:19.920 Either way, everybody, you got to put off washing your privates for at least another week in Calgary,
00:05:24.600 I guess, because they still haven't figured out exactly how long it's going to take to get the
00:05:27.760 water back to normal. And we really need some answers. I mean, the legacy media is busy with
00:05:32.560 their lips locked on Gondek's tired butt and saying, oh, look, she's learned now. She's been 0.95
00:05:37.780 communicating excellently. Sure she has, but she hasn't been saying a bloody thing. We still haven't
00:05:42.040 found out why this happened, how this happened. I mean, again, accidents happen, but we're talking a
00:05:47.440 city of one and a half million people. This is not a minor oversight or minor problem.