A war of words has surfaced between mayoral candidates Naheed Nenshi and Bill Smith centering on the future of Calgary Transit’s LRT expansion.
The Green Line transit project, in its current form, has been approved by city council and nearly $3 billion in funding has been pledged by the federal and provincial levels of government.
On Friday, Smith referred to the decision to build only a fraction of the proposed Green Line, constructing 20 kilometres of the orginally planned 46 kilometres of track, at a cost greater than the estimated budget for the entire project as a boondoggle. Smith says he wants to scrap the plans for the project in its current form.
“I’m not saying no to the Green Line,” said Smith. “What I’m saying is the objective of the Green Line is to move people, move Calgarians, from one part of the city to the other. The idea was to initially move them from the south hospital right to the north end of the city for $4.5 billion. Well apparently we can’t do that for $4.5 billion so we (only) get 20 kilometres of line.”
The initial leg of the Green Line will see trains travelling between the Shepard Industrial Park in the city’s southeast and the intersection of 16 Avenue and Centre Street North with plans to expand the line northward and southward in the years to come.
“I think what we need to do is take a look at this and go ‘Are we going to move people south to the city centre?’ or ‘Are we going to move them from the north to the city centre?’,” said Smith. “Pick one or the other, not the in between.”
Calgary's incumbent mayor referred to Smith’s plan to halt the largest infrastructure project in Calgary’s history as ‘shocking’ and ‘remarkably, breathtakingly uninformed’
“For someone who never went to an info session, never bothered to attend a council or committee meeting or who's never before raised a question about it in Mayoral forums, to come up and say something so uninformed, its reckless and dangerous and it runs the risk of snuffing out our fragile economic recovery," said Nenshi. “Mr Smith never said it in a forum, he never said it in front of an audience, but he has now announced that he is going to cancel the Green Line."
“It really shows Mr. Smith’s habit of repeating what the last person he talked to said.”
Brian Mason, Alberta’s Minister of Infrastructure, says the pledged funds should not be viewed as a blank check to the City of Calgary.
"We're not going to give carte blanche approval of $1.5 billion of provincial public money unless we have a definite alignment approved by the council, a budget and a design," said Mason. "If they want to change that alignment, we'll have to begin that process again."
In addition to potentially jeopardizing the $3 billion in funding from the province and the federal government, Nenshi says cancelling the Green Line at this time would result in ‘unthinkable costs’.
“The engineering work has been done, $100 million has been sunk in, the enormous amounts of engagement that’s been done – it would all would have to be scrapped, all of it,” said Nenshi. “You would have to start all over again and, to me, it’s just unimaginable in terms of the time and the money."
"It is reckless it is uninformed to try and pull back on such an important project for Calgary."
After listing the potential losses that would result from scrapping the Green Line work, Nenshi made a less than flattering comparison between his opponent and a controversial man who had served as Toronto’s mayor.
"This is oddly reminiscent of another football player who ran for mayor who decided to cancel an already funded transit plan,” said Nenshi, “and, after Rob Ford became mayor, seven years later there's still no plan for a subway or LRT in Scarborough."
Smith chose not to issue a response after hearing of the comparison to the late Toronto mayor.
With files from CTV's Stephanie Wiebe
