Democracy may eventually win but Calgary taxpayers will still get the (water) shaft.When I first started looking at water conditions in Alberta and related policy issues, I had no idea that delivery infrastructure could ever be a problem. I was wrong. But now that the Calgary water main crisis is over (but not quite and it may never end) is there anything we can learn from this debacle?The first and most important lesson is that officials should not obscure or deny the obvious explanation for why the crisis arose. City Hall can save the review committee a whole year (not that they will ever figure out how to select the panel) by providing the reason for the break now.Because they know, now. That is the easy part although explaining why ongoing structural testing was not done may be a bit embarrassing.The cause of the break is well understood. That is, the structural failure was caused when the pipe’s concrete shell dissolved, due to contact with unidentified contaminates.While it has not been disclosed what those containments were, it is inconceivable to me that the technical staff in waterworks have not identified them and neutralized them, at least in that section of pipe.The proposition that the engineers and technicians don’t have a cause for the failure is absurd. Calgarians need to know what they know... now. Anything else smells like a cover up.City council should pass a motion requesting the City Auditor’s Office do an immediate review within waterworks to determine the cause of the failure and the reasons for no ongoing structural pipe monitoring. If they want an independent review then the provincial Auditor General could perhaps help out.The second lesson is to not be too hard on the politicians. Mayor Jyoti Gondek shows what happens to people who are not just “not ready” to govern, but who will never be ready.She no doubt felt that this crisis was a great opportunity. She could show everyone that she was a great mayor and a great leader in a time of need.Unfortunately, her bad political instincts, her seemingly clueless sense of voter perceptions and her inability to reign-in inappropriate comments where on show in full force.The few Calgarians who still had some positive views of her, or were willing to give her the benefit of the doubt, are having serious second thoughts. Like Justin Trudeau and Joe Biden, (unless they are forcibly removed) she will run again in the next civic election. It will be embarrassing.But it makes no sense to get mad at her or other City Hall politicians. They don’t understand anything about how the complex water infrastructure works (even some of the senior officials don’t seem to know) and they have no idea where to institute physical structural fixes or even institutional safe guards to prevent future problems. The next election will sort out the politicians as the electorate sees fit.The third lesson is that facts matter. What doesn’t matter is the political messaging or the contextual narrative. On Wednesday night, June 5th, when people came home from work and digested the news, they panicked. Immediately, they stockpiled water in bathtubs, picnic jugs and washing pails. Water demand spiked at more than 650 million litres, 15% more than is typical.Did the politicians and officials do anything to quell the panic? No. They made it worse.The messaging the next day was, “Calgary will run out of water.” However, by the time folks came home on Thursday night it was clear to them that our water supply was not under serious threat. When they turned the water on it was at full pressure. None of their friends and neighbours reported a lack of water. And social media (which we love to hate) did not report any problems.So, Calgarians ignored the messaging and hyperbole. However, they took this as a warning and seriously reduced water consumption where they could. But Calgarians are also good at discerning “all hat and no cattle”.Or in this case too much cowgirl bull from the mayor vs. the straight shooting from someone who knew how the system worked and was adapted to deal with the break.(Listen to Chris Houston starting at about 1 min. in)The fourth lesson is this might have been a bit of an overreaction by the City.Early on, officials knew that day to day water supply would not be seriously jeopardized. Further, even the detection of additional pipe anomalies (hot spots — really?) didn’t indicate that lightning had struck twice. Rather it was more like two trees were hit by the same bolt. Nonetheless, the fear narrative (“fire hydrants will go dry and surgeons can’t wash”) feeding the moral panic needed to be propped up.Plus, the officials wanted re-up their control and oversight by declaring a state of emergency.That’s not to say that emergency legislation and plans are not extremely useful. But this was not your run of the mill emergency. This situation, unlike the 2013 flood, was not dynamic and changing hour to hour and day to day.Emergency Chief Sue Henry really didn’t provide any new substantive information after the very first press conference. Things were not getting worse but things were not getting repaired very fast either.The stated reason for declaring a state of emergency, “the City needs to encroach on private property” doesn’t really hold water (excuse the bad pun.) Construction crews had plenty of area for staging their operations by commandeering 16th Avenue on both sides of the excavation. The repairs on the two new areas of suspect pipe took place in record time.The fifth lesson is that Calgarians remain highly civic-minded and will show great social responsibility when there is a crisis.This was in full force through and after the 2013 flood and last winter when the electrical grid almost collapsed.This time, Calgarians were voluntarily reducing water use substantially, and virtually everyone was examining their personal water use habits.However, this was not going to be enough for those folks who like to use a “command and control” approach to crisis management. Every day we were praised for doing our part and thanked for being such great citizens.But those words didn’t match the city’s actions. We were informed by a uniformed official that enforcers were no longer going to provide information to citizens but rather were going to hand out big fines for anyone so foolish to commit “water misuse”. My. Oh my. This is the same sort of heavy-handed approach that worked so well during COVID. Except those actions have been called the “greatest peacetime policy failure in Canada's history”. Sweden, it seems, got it right with no mandates and no school closures. But some obvious lessons seem to be too hard to learn. And of course no good police state can survive without informants (see comments starting at 7:35).Admittedly, 3000 complaints for 300,000 households hardly moves us into the ranks of death camps, Gulags, and Cultural Revolutions. But the important thing to remember is that this is just a matter of degree, not a difference in kind. And hey, you have to start somewhere.The sixth lesson relates how tolerant City officials and citizens are to collateral damage. Turns out “we are all in this together” except some of us are more together than others (apologies to Animal Farm.) Remember 35% of Calgary’s water use is by business. And this isn’t just what they need to flush their toilets. Water is a critical factor input in many businesses, not just irrigation companies. It’s hard to make concrete or beer without water. It’s hard to wash peoples windows without water. It is impossible to provide landscape services without watering the plants. There are millions of dollars of business being lost. Thousands of companies are likely affected. Tens of thousands of employees are idle and hopefully collecting unemployment benefits. The absurdity of the restrictions is that home improvement stores and nurseries have a huge inventory of trees, shrubs, sod and flowers that they are free to water. But if you want to plant those in your garden you have to let them die. City council should set up compensation for those businesses that suffered financial hardship because the City locked them out of work. This can be program based and require legitimate documentation. These people deserve to be reimbursed for their losses. Or maybe Tamara Lich can come off the bench to organize an Irrigators Convey to honk a bit in front of City Hall.Finally, my seventh lesson is my own observations on my personal water use. My house doesn’t ‘waste’ much water except for watering our grass, which we like to be green. But still we can do better. Trying the ‘mellow yellow’ thing with toilets reveals that when you do flush, things have gotten pretty high. Also, you need to clean them more often so I’m not sure there is any net water savings.One thing I learned is that it takes 3.5 litres of cool water before I get hot in my kitchen sink. This surprised me and we now catch this water for use in rinsing dishes. As for catching water in a bucket as we shower, we are going to give that a hard pass as at our life-stage our primary objective when bathing is to prevent any calls to EMS. Getting clean is a secondary objective.What I did notice was how much water I use cleaning my garbage. To be a good recycler you need to wash a lot of stuff that we just used to throw away. What to do when environmental virtue creates such conflicts? It’s not quite Sophie’s Choice and perhaps we should just be thankful that we have such first world problems.Finally, remember that all this is just part of the greater drama that is climate alarmism and eventual state domination of our every thought, whim and action.For those rolling your eyes at such conspiracy paranoia, remember the folks who wanted to tell you what kind of package you must use to take home your fast food take-out. Or the type of cutlery you could use to eat that same junk food. And let’s not forget about those soggy paper straws that the state forces us to use.You would think that these folks could figure out how to keep their own big concrete straws working before telling us how to drink a milkshake.William D. Marriott is a retired economist who specialized in public policy analysis of the oil and gas industry.
Democracy may eventually win but Calgary taxpayers will still get the (water) shaft.When I first started looking at water conditions in Alberta and related policy issues, I had no idea that delivery infrastructure could ever be a problem. I was wrong. But now that the Calgary water main crisis is over (but not quite and it may never end) is there anything we can learn from this debacle?The first and most important lesson is that officials should not obscure or deny the obvious explanation for why the crisis arose. City Hall can save the review committee a whole year (not that they will ever figure out how to select the panel) by providing the reason for the break now.Because they know, now. That is the easy part although explaining why ongoing structural testing was not done may be a bit embarrassing.The cause of the break is well understood. That is, the structural failure was caused when the pipe’s concrete shell dissolved, due to contact with unidentified contaminates.While it has not been disclosed what those containments were, it is inconceivable to me that the technical staff in waterworks have not identified them and neutralized them, at least in that section of pipe.The proposition that the engineers and technicians don’t have a cause for the failure is absurd. Calgarians need to know what they know... now. Anything else smells like a cover up.City council should pass a motion requesting the City Auditor’s Office do an immediate review within waterworks to determine the cause of the failure and the reasons for no ongoing structural pipe monitoring. If they want an independent review then the provincial Auditor General could perhaps help out.The second lesson is to not be too hard on the politicians. Mayor Jyoti Gondek shows what happens to people who are not just “not ready” to govern, but who will never be ready.She no doubt felt that this crisis was a great opportunity. She could show everyone that she was a great mayor and a great leader in a time of need.Unfortunately, her bad political instincts, her seemingly clueless sense of voter perceptions and her inability to reign-in inappropriate comments where on show in full force.The few Calgarians who still had some positive views of her, or were willing to give her the benefit of the doubt, are having serious second thoughts. Like Justin Trudeau and Joe Biden, (unless they are forcibly removed) she will run again in the next civic election. It will be embarrassing.But it makes no sense to get mad at her or other City Hall politicians. They don’t understand anything about how the complex water infrastructure works (even some of the senior officials don’t seem to know) and they have no idea where to institute physical structural fixes or even institutional safe guards to prevent future problems. The next election will sort out the politicians as the electorate sees fit.The third lesson is that facts matter. What doesn’t matter is the political messaging or the contextual narrative. On Wednesday night, June 5th, when people came home from work and digested the news, they panicked. Immediately, they stockpiled water in bathtubs, picnic jugs and washing pails. Water demand spiked at more than 650 million litres, 15% more than is typical.Did the politicians and officials do anything to quell the panic? No. They made it worse.The messaging the next day was, “Calgary will run out of water.” However, by the time folks came home on Thursday night it was clear to them that our water supply was not under serious threat. When they turned the water on it was at full pressure. None of their friends and neighbours reported a lack of water. And social media (which we love to hate) did not report any problems.So, Calgarians ignored the messaging and hyperbole. However, they took this as a warning and seriously reduced water consumption where they could. But Calgarians are also good at discerning “all hat and no cattle”.Or in this case too much cowgirl bull from the mayor vs. the straight shooting from someone who knew how the system worked and was adapted to deal with the break.(Listen to Chris Houston starting at about 1 min. in)The fourth lesson is this might have been a bit of an overreaction by the City.Early on, officials knew that day to day water supply would not be seriously jeopardized. Further, even the detection of additional pipe anomalies (hot spots — really?) didn’t indicate that lightning had struck twice. Rather it was more like two trees were hit by the same bolt. Nonetheless, the fear narrative (“fire hydrants will go dry and surgeons can’t wash”) feeding the moral panic needed to be propped up.Plus, the officials wanted re-up their control and oversight by declaring a state of emergency.That’s not to say that emergency legislation and plans are not extremely useful. But this was not your run of the mill emergency. This situation, unlike the 2013 flood, was not dynamic and changing hour to hour and day to day.Emergency Chief Sue Henry really didn’t provide any new substantive information after the very first press conference. Things were not getting worse but things were not getting repaired very fast either.The stated reason for declaring a state of emergency, “the City needs to encroach on private property” doesn’t really hold water (excuse the bad pun.) Construction crews had plenty of area for staging their operations by commandeering 16th Avenue on both sides of the excavation. The repairs on the two new areas of suspect pipe took place in record time.The fifth lesson is that Calgarians remain highly civic-minded and will show great social responsibility when there is a crisis.This was in full force through and after the 2013 flood and last winter when the electrical grid almost collapsed.This time, Calgarians were voluntarily reducing water use substantially, and virtually everyone was examining their personal water use habits.However, this was not going to be enough for those folks who like to use a “command and control” approach to crisis management. Every day we were praised for doing our part and thanked for being such great citizens.But those words didn’t match the city’s actions. We were informed by a uniformed official that enforcers were no longer going to provide information to citizens but rather were going to hand out big fines for anyone so foolish to commit “water misuse”. My. Oh my. This is the same sort of heavy-handed approach that worked so well during COVID. Except those actions have been called the “greatest peacetime policy failure in Canada's history”. Sweden, it seems, got it right with no mandates and no school closures. But some obvious lessons seem to be too hard to learn. And of course no good police state can survive without informants (see comments starting at 7:35).Admittedly, 3000 complaints for 300,000 households hardly moves us into the ranks of death camps, Gulags, and Cultural Revolutions. But the important thing to remember is that this is just a matter of degree, not a difference in kind. And hey, you have to start somewhere.The sixth lesson relates how tolerant City officials and citizens are to collateral damage. Turns out “we are all in this together” except some of us are more together than others (apologies to Animal Farm.) Remember 35% of Calgary’s water use is by business. And this isn’t just what they need to flush their toilets. Water is a critical factor input in many businesses, not just irrigation companies. It’s hard to make concrete or beer without water. It’s hard to wash peoples windows without water. It is impossible to provide landscape services without watering the plants. There are millions of dollars of business being lost. Thousands of companies are likely affected. Tens of thousands of employees are idle and hopefully collecting unemployment benefits. The absurdity of the restrictions is that home improvement stores and nurseries have a huge inventory of trees, shrubs, sod and flowers that they are free to water. But if you want to plant those in your garden you have to let them die. City council should set up compensation for those businesses that suffered financial hardship because the City locked them out of work. This can be program based and require legitimate documentation. These people deserve to be reimbursed for their losses. Or maybe Tamara Lich can come off the bench to organize an Irrigators Convey to honk a bit in front of City Hall.Finally, my seventh lesson is my own observations on my personal water use. My house doesn’t ‘waste’ much water except for watering our grass, which we like to be green. But still we can do better. Trying the ‘mellow yellow’ thing with toilets reveals that when you do flush, things have gotten pretty high. Also, you need to clean them more often so I’m not sure there is any net water savings.One thing I learned is that it takes 3.5 litres of cool water before I get hot in my kitchen sink. This surprised me and we now catch this water for use in rinsing dishes. As for catching water in a bucket as we shower, we are going to give that a hard pass as at our life-stage our primary objective when bathing is to prevent any calls to EMS. Getting clean is a secondary objective.What I did notice was how much water I use cleaning my garbage. To be a good recycler you need to wash a lot of stuff that we just used to throw away. What to do when environmental virtue creates such conflicts? It’s not quite Sophie’s Choice and perhaps we should just be thankful that we have such first world problems.Finally, remember that all this is just part of the greater drama that is climate alarmism and eventual state domination of our every thought, whim and action.For those rolling your eyes at such conspiracy paranoia, remember the folks who wanted to tell you what kind of package you must use to take home your fast food take-out. Or the type of cutlery you could use to eat that same junk food. And let’s not forget about those soggy paper straws that the state forces us to use.You would think that these folks could figure out how to keep their own big concrete straws working before telling us how to drink a milkshake.William D. Marriott is a retired economist who specialized in public policy analysis of the oil and gas industry.
