From the Calgary Herald – July 16, 2009

I’ve been thinking about the Dementors from Harry Potter lately–the skeletal wraiths who suck the joy and hope out of life. No, I haven’t seen the new movie yet, but I have been attending city council meetings and web-casts. Same thing, really.

When our aldermen get together, we are treated to grandstanding, confusing policy and no end of is-this-really-happening moments. This week’s meeting was no exception.

First, we had the bizarre situation of council approving individual secondary suites. Since the much ballyhooed grant program was announced last year as a “solution” to the affordable housing crisis, council had (by the end of March) approved a total of four suites. That’s not a typo.

On Monday, they debated two more of them–both were supported by the neighbours, and both applicants spent a great deal of time and money getting to this stage. One was approved, one not, for what appeared to be completely capricious reasons.

Contrast our situation with that of Edmonton, which legalized secondary suites across the city earlier this year, or Vancouver, which did so in 2004. The sky has not fallen in, and many thousands of affordable rental units have been normalized and made safe. In Calgary, we’ve now got five units, and council has wasted hours debating each one.

Next, we had Ald. Joe Connelly, who continued in his quest to dethrone Rob Anders and Ron Liepert as Most Embarrassing West Side Politician (and why is there such a race for this position? What’s in the water west of Sarcee?) Readers will recall that Connelly is the one who asked the development industry to help him sell tickets to his fund-raiser in the run-up to the Plan-It Public Hearings.

During those hearings, Connelly was at his best –browbeating ordinary citizens by asking what he may have thought were clever leading questions, but which left him looking like a bully to many.

At one point, he asked a question about supply and demand of housing, and James Schwinn, a local financier, elegantly explained that the development industry was looking at only one side of the equation, and that Plan-It would not result in higher housing prices, all things being equal. Connelly, clearly not understanding the answer, called Schwinn, who had given up his day and evening to be there, “long-winded” and summarized by saying “so, prices will go up then.”

The following day, when the development industry presented its side, Connelly was at the ready, with softball questions that his interlocutors just happened to have PowerPoint slides at the ready to answer.

All of this would be sort of forgivable (public hearings are little more than theatre, after all), if Connelly had not tried to introduce a motion last Monday to gut Plan-It of its targets, and to turn it over to a stakeholder group consisting entirely of development industry members. This after council sent a list of nearly 100 amendments, including many dealing with stakeholders and implementation, to administration only two weeks ago.

When the Mayor pointed out to Connelly that his motion would mean reconsidering the decision reached after many hours of public hearings and more than 500 written submissions, Connelly seemed surprised and backed down, merely adding his motion to all the other amendments.

What to make of this? Either, after 20 months as an alderman, he still doesn’t know how Council works, or he just felt the need to declare his dedication to the development industry again, while wasting everyone else’s time. Joe, we get it.

The meeting ended with yet another debate on ward boundaries. After refusing to consider a recommendation from the Chief Electoral Officer, council rejected the only other option, realized it had nothing left, and passed the recommendation it had refused to even discuss less than an hour earlier.

The best exchange here came when Ald. John Mar suggested that the discussion was getting “murky”, and the Mayor responded “murky began months ago”. I think he may have meant when the council was elected in November 2007.

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