The first thing Jyoti Gondek did as the newly elected Mayor of Calgary was to declare a climate emergency, though she never campaigned on doing so. Her declaration was received by Calgarians with all of the approval of a fart at a funeral..Undeterred, Gondek continued with her climate crusade and managed to get the Calgary Event Centre project canceled within her first month as mayor due to rising costs, not the least of which were due to new climate change measures being applied to the project unexpectedly by the city..Gondek managed to win the dubious honor of being the least popular newly elected Calgarian Mayor in living memory as her approval numbers plummeted to 38% within months of being elected..There's an emergency in Calgary and citizens want it addressed. The emergency has nothing to do with the climate, however..Over the course of the pandemic, Calgary’s downtown has deteriorated into something akin to a dystopian scene from a movie. Ground level businesses are graced with 'For Lease' signs while more than 30% of the office spaces remain vacant. Addicts and homeless people are everywhere, while discarded needles and human waste have become common sights on the streets..People don’t feel safe downtown, yet in response, Calgary constantly attacks the police force with threats of defunding and demoralizes them with the ordered removal of a patch that commemorates fallen officers..Calgary’s transit service is still at only 60% of the usage it was prior to the pandemic. The reason for that is clear. Addicts are passed out in bus shelters, and the only thing that drowns out the smell of piss on trains is the wafts of meth smoke as it is openly consumed. People have been randomly attacked on train platforms and the city closed a number of expensive train stations rather than deal with the addicts who had set up camp within them..The city’s latest effort to get people to use transit is an initiative to cut fares in half for a couple months. They have also implemented a policy calling for heavy fines if a person catcalls a woman on a sidewalk, but have no plan on dealing with aggressive addicts. Even if transit was free, people won’t ride it if they don’t feel safe. Cloistered, naïve city councilors will never understand this as they drive their SUVs and park in their secure, indoor parkade..Whether Calgarians like it or not, Gondek’s climate crusade is the city’s top priority and the climate plan Calgary’s administration is proposing is shocking in scope and cost..Calgary’s climate change plan is set to come in at a cost of $87 billion over the next 28 years. That amounts to over $87,000 per taxpayer or about $3,100 per year. Let’s not pretend the city will stay within budget on this initiative — that cost will rise..The plan sets an impossible bar for the city to realize “net zero” emissions by 2050 along with forcing 60% of Calgarians to travel without personal vehicles. They will have somehow eliminated all non-electric vehicles by then as well. .New building codes and retrofitting will cost a fortune. Calgary is already in an economic crisis and these ludicrous regulations will turn the city into an investment pariah..Neighboring municipalities have already been reaping the benefits of Calgary’s woke administration as citizens and businesses have been fleeing the city to escape high taxes and regulation. The city’s latest plan will cause nothing short of an exodus. The bill for the city’s climate action dreams will only be filled with massive tax increases upon businesses and homes..The actions of the city will only exacerbate the existing problems, of course. Calgary’s downtown will become increasingly moribund, and budgets will fall short as producers flee the city. Calgary’s myopic mayor and city council will likely only respond with further tax hikes to try fill the budget void. An ugly cycle to the economic bottom..A once great and thriving city is on the path to being like Detroit or perhaps San Francisco where one has to fight to avoid stepping in human excrement while trying to navigate through the endless tent cities..Calgary is far from alone in this. Many municipalities have allowed their governance to be taken over by woke politicians and they are paying a hard price for it..In the end, the responsibility still falls on the voters. If they refuse to pay attention to who is running for office, it's inevitable a gang of clowns will rise to the top as they have in Calgary..We keep our eyes too focused on federal and provincial politics at times and forget who's controlling our lives locally..For that electoral error, Calgary and many other cities are on the road to economic ruin..And it won’t do a thing to help the environment.
