From the Calgary Herald – Sept 10, 2009

Earlier this summer, Calgary city council debated whether to ask employees for cost-saving ideas, and eventually passed a motion. It took a couple of months to put in place, but a call for such ideas went out last week.

Setting aside the absurdity of that paragraph

–they had to debate whether or not to save money? It takes two months to send a memo? — this is a welcome move. However, it’s just the first step.

As council comes back from summer vacation and thinks about its priorities for the year, it has a great chance to ask some big questions about what a municipal government is and about what it should do in a city of a million people.

This may sound a bit ridiculous– the City of Calgary has been around for more than 100 years, after all–but it gets to the heart of the challenges this council has had. Too many councillors and administrators seem to think that running a city of a million is like running a city of 300,000, only bigger.

It isn’t.

As we grow, issues grow with us, sometimes exponentially. A recent survey showed that urban Canadians are more concerned, for example, about crime and safety than about any issue. Most big cities learned long ago that issues of crime in an urban environment require solutions that go beyond simply hiring more police as the population grows. Yet we spend our time asking why our downtown beat cops need $200 cowboy hats, not why it has taken us so long to adopt community-based policing and having beat cops in the first place.

Similarly, I, like most Calgarians, am aghast at the recent controversy over the murals at Swinton’s Art Supply. The owner had covered his front windows with reproductions of art masterpieces, including portions of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel painting. The city ordered him to remove the art, arguing that it violated the sign bylaw. When Swinton agreed to remove his store name from the sign, he was told that was still no good, since the bylaw states that windows may not be more than 30 per cent covered (except during Stampede, when the bylaw is not generally enforced).

What was missing in the coverage of this incident (which has been temporarily resolved by the city agreeing to allow Swinton to apply for another permit as it reviews its regulations) was the word “why?” Why does the city care how much of a window is covered?Why is it the city’s business how someone advertises his commerce on his own property?

Answers to these questions are few and far between. The city’s John Purdy half-heartedly explained that the bylaw is to prevent pedestrians from being bombarded with advertising. While this is an odd argument to make for a store in a strip mall in an industrial area, facing parking, it also begs the question of why it is the city’s job to protect pedestrians from seeing commercial messages.

Purdy, in an interview with a community newsletter, later suggested that the bylaw was in place so emergency personnel might need a clear view into the interior of the store. So, I suppose then that it ought to be illegal for stores and offices to close their blinds or drapes on sunny days. Further, businesses should not open without windows to the street–so all those casinos, shopping malls, bars and adult stores are in big trouble now.

It’s clear to me that what Purdy is doing is defending a bylaw simply because it exists. The same happens when we see officers enforcing the rules on life-jackets on the Elbow River in August–as one friend put it, why wouldn’t he just stand up in the shallow, slow water, since there is no rule about wearing a life-jacket when wading?

Or how about the two bylaw officers I saw on the south shore of the Bow during the folk festival? They weren’t enjoying the soaring vocals of Mavis Staples; they were measuring her noise levels at 7 p. m. on a sunny Sunday.

The festival already complies with the times it needs to start and shut down, and with all kinds of city rules. If one of Mavis’s notes cracked a decibel or two above the limit, would that really change people’s quality of life?

The big question, then, is not about how to scrimp and save to get us through a difficult budget year. It’s about asking ourselves what role our government ought to have in helping improve the lives of citizens.

Answering that question will make the other budget decisions so much easier.

Naheed Nenshi teaches At Mount Royal University’s Bissett School Of Business

« Back to “In His Own Words”