The title of this piece is tongue in cheek. I know quite well that Mayor Jyoti Gondek and her council dominated by union-backed members has no interest in managing the city of Calgary with a free-market approach. The conversation among Gondek supporters since she torpedoed the event centre deal with the Calgary Flames organization has been interesting nonetheless..Suddenly, it has become en vogue for Calgary progressives to celebrate the separation between private and government enterprises. Embittered Gondek supporters have been vocal in pointing out how the city should never have been involved with the construction of the event centre in the first place. They spit out the words “greedy” and “profit” while decrying billionaires as evil. They make it crystal clear that there is no room for partnerships between the city of Calgary and any venture that may turn a profit for its owners..I am OK with this though I don’t really have any problem with billionaires. The problem is, Gondek’s gang is being selective with which enterprises should be backed by taxpayers and which shouldn’t. The correct answer is that no private enterprises should be subsidized by taxpayers. The only role the city should have is to stick to its jurisdictional roles of maintaining roads, providing emergency services, and facilitating the smooth operation of enterprises in general. Gondek has shown no interest in sticking to her role as mayor however and is wasting time and money chasing climate change dreams while trying to present herself as a hero for individual rights in Quebec..While sycophantic cheerleaders for Gondek are suddenly opposed to corporate welfare, they go rather silent when Calgary Economic Development (CED) is brought up..Calgary Economic Development is a taxpayer-funded corporation that supposedly operates at an arm’s length from city council. CED was given a slush fund of a hundred million tax dollars years ago and was tasked with drawing new investment into the city. Being a separate corporation from the city, CED is immune from public accountability. We can’t even make FOIP requests to find out exactly how they have been managing the massive budget they were given. If the state of Calgary’s downtown is any indication, CED has been nothing less than a catastrophic failure..Mary Moran is the former head of CED and she was pulling in a healthy $290,000 per year to run the group. Her role must have been limited though since she was able to take a leave from CED for months in order to pursue a failed campaign to draw the 2026 Olympics to Calgary. She was paid well for that of course and then returned to her CED chair once taxpayers told her and Nenshi where they could put their Olympic plans. Moran suddenly resigned from her role with CED a few months ago and has vanished from the public spotlight. Why would somebody in such a well-paid, cushy job suddenly quit like that? We may never know but we will be stuck with the bill..If Gondek and her supporters truly want to tackle wasteful corporate welfare, they should begin with CED. It has sucked tax dollars from struggling, existing businesses in Calgary in order to try and entice competing new businesses into the city. The CED has proven skilled at sucking those tax dollars in but has been virtually useless in drawing new businesses into Calgary. Nobody can pretend to oppose corporate welfare while supporting the continuation of CED and its tax-funded slush fund..CED has been something of a patronage pit for favored friends of Calgary’s city administration. Jason Ribeiro was supposedly a selfless organizer working on the ground in hopes of drawing a yes vote from voters during the 2026 Olympic bid plebiscite. Upon the failure of his campaign, he found himself appointed to a position within CED. Surely a coincidence..Calgary never should have been partnered with the Flames organization in the construction of a new event centre in the first place. That said, once the deal was signed, the city should have continued to deal in good faith. We will never know if the new expenses that the city kept dumping on the deal were intended to kill the deal or if they accidentally pushed it too far. The bottom line is the city kept trying to change the deal after the fact and it led to the likely demise of the entire project. Not only did the deal die, but the city of Calgary has proven itself to be a terrible organization to do business with..Despite these hard lessons and examples on why the city of Calgary should steer clear of the domain of private enterprises, I don’t hold much confidence that they will have learned anything from this. While the city may not get into new partnerships with sports organizations, they will continue to dump tax dollars into failed projects through CED while large enterprises such as Amazon will keep their expansions outside of the city limits in order to escape the clutches of Calgary’s mayor and council..We are in hard economic times and still have hard times ahead of us. We had hoped for productive change in the last municipal election but it appears that the new mayor and council may manage to make the last mayor and council look like free-enterprise supporting, business wizards..At least satellite communities will continue to benefit as people continue to flee outward and take their investment dollars with them..Cory Morgan is Assistant Opinion & Broadcast Editor for the Western Standard.cmorgan@westernstandardonline.com
