The UCP Will Pay a Price for Calgary’s LRT Train Wreck

When Alberta Transportation Minister Devin Dreeshen sent his letter to Calgary Mayor Jyoti Gondek last Tuesday telling her the province was pulling its promised $1.53-billion contribution to the Green Line light rail transit project, he triggered the Pottery Barn Rule.

If you break it, you own it.

Dreeshen, Premier Danielle Smith and the rest of the United Conservative Party brain trust can try to pass off the Green Line fiasco as an effort to block a boondoggle supposedly caused by former Calgary mayor Naheed Nenshi, now the leader of the Opposition NDP, as the minister claimed in his letter to Gondek.

But that’s like trying to persuade the Pottery Barn manager that someone pushed you just before you dropped that expensive lamp. (OK, the Pottery Barn Rule is just a folk tale. The political Pottery Barn Rule, though, is real.)

It’s Dreeshen who signed the letter saying the province was pulling the plug on the Green Line. (He cc’d it only to Rob Anderson — which is telling, suggesting the director of the Premier’s Office, Alberta separatist and former Wildrose Party House leader really is the power behind Smith’s throne.)

So it’s Dreeshen, as the front man for the United Conservative Party, who broke the Green Line, killing as many as 20,000 Calgary jobs in the process.

And therefore, dear readers, it’s the UCP that owns the Green Line fiasco now.

Dreeshen himself now stands a significant chance of being thrown under the wheels of the LRT if this brainiac scheme to put Nenshi on the spot by painting him as mismanaging an expensive civic project in his previous position goes south like the first phase of the Green Line was supposed to do.

Hitherto best known for being photographed in a red MAGA cap at Donald Trump’s New York election night victory party on Nov. 8, 2016, and for the cries of "shields up" in his legislature building office before the day-drinking began, Dreeshen could now go down as the fellow who infuriated enough Calgary voters who might otherwise have been tempted to stick with the UCP to change history.

Then again, kicking Calgary in the teeth is unlikely to bother many voters in his rural Innisfail-Sylvan Lake riding, so he probably doesn’t have to worry about job security any time soon.

Still, this certainly hasn’t pleased the Calgary Construction Association, so that’s one source of donations to the UCP that may be about to dry up. None of Calgary’s 12 Conservative MLAs has screamed publicly, but that doesn’t mean sharp words aren’t being exchanged in private.

Even Don Braid, the veteran Calgary Herald political columnist not known for unkind sentiments about the UCP, politely warned the government that it’s playing with fire in Calgary if it can’t find a way to get this train back on track.

“Whatever happens, the province is honour-bound to build the Green Line,” he wrote. “It’s leaving a lot of leverage in the hands of political opponents.” Well, it’s hard to argue with that part!

The province might set up a provincial agency to take over the city project, Braid suggested.

But, speaking of potential boondoggles, there’s no guarantee the feds, who had also pledged $1.53 billion, or even the city, would fork over more dough to a UCP-managed project.

And from now on, the government will have to wear anything that goes wrong with the project if it’s restarted, and take the full blame if it stays dead, or even if Dreeshen’s promised review just takes too long.

For her part, Gondek is now looking for a way to get the project rolling again.

She’s already convincingly refuted Dreeshen’s claim he changed his mind about the Green Line only after he saw the city’s scaled-down Aug. 15 business case. No, she told the CBC, they gave him the information “early and often” in July.

Thanks to the way Dreeshen and whoever advised him played it, Gondek holds some pretty decent cards.