Calgary’s Green Line, a massive planned expansion to the city’s transit system, is in a state of light rail limbo: neither going ahead nor totally dead.
City council voted last week to stop work on the project. The mayor and councillors in favour of halting the line say Alberta’s governing United Conservative Party forced their hand this month by going back on their word to provide $1.53-billion to the project, a long-standing commitment that had been reaffirmed as recently as Aug. 1.
Construction on the light-rail line was already underway. The mayor and city administration argue it’s too late to go back to the drawing board – as the province wants – after years of planning. An orderly wind down is the only option.
“Withdrawing the funding killed the project. There is no more Green Line, as we’ve known it,” Calgary Mayor Jyoti Gondek said.
On the other side, the Danielle Smith government argues it has stepped in to stop a slow-motion boondoogle. The project cost has gone up while the number of stations have been whittled down to seven from the original 29. “A stub line barely reaching out of downtown,” is how Transportation Minister Devin Dreeshen characterizes it.
Meanwhile, the Alberta Premier now speaks about the fracas between her government and the city as a mere bump in the road. Danielle Smith said a newly commissioned engineering study – which will cut the costly plan to bore a tunnel under downtown, and focus on above-ground service to the southeastern suburbs – will somehow find an alternative, less-expensive alignment before Christmas.
No doubt, getting it right is important. The Green Line is one of the province’s largest-ever projects in one of the fastest growing cities in the country. And despite its reputation as being car-centric, Calgary’s CTrain system is eminently usable and has high ridership.
The plan for the new line began in 2011, and got a $1.53-billion promise of cash from the federal Conservatives in 2015 – with the announcement coming from then-senior cabinet minister Jason Kenney. Two years later, the then-governing Alberta NDP agreed to match that amount with provincial dollars.
The Smith government is correct when it says the project has steadily shrunk. The Green Line was supposed to stretch from the far north of the city down into the southeast, with as many as 140,000 daily riders. The cost estimate from the city in 2015, around $4.5-billion, now seems wildly optimistic. It was given before the engineering work was complete.
Once Mr. Kenney became Alberta’s premier in 2019, he introduced an austerity budget that pushed almost all of the provincial funding into the distant future. His government slowed the project in 2020 and 2021 with reviews, highlighting concerns about costs, governance structure and the procurement strategy.
Rising construction costs over the years have also been part of the winding story, with post-pandemic inflationary pressures hitting hard. In the city’s July incarnation of the project, the plan was to build just one small phase of the new line. The cost for even that was estimated at $6.2-billion, with daily ridership at 32,000.
With the province’s retreat this month, and council’s decision to wind the project down, the city is in a precarious position. It could face an outlay of $2.1-billion – $1.3-billion already spent and an estimated $850-million to wind the project down – with nothing to show for it. To put it in perspective, that would be equal to Calgary property-tax revenues for one year.
The province said it’s not going to help out with the wind-down costs, saying Alberta taxpayers shouldn’t foot the bill for city mismanagement.
But there’s still the question of why the province withdrew its support so late in the game. Concern about the cost of underground tunnelling, for instance, had existed for years. The decision smacks of being a partisan attack when the UCP also links the Green Line to Ms. Smith’s formidable political opponent, Alberta NDP Leader Naheed Nenshi. The UCP calls it the “Nenshi nightmare” in reference to the former mayor’s long-time championing of the project.
In timing and tone, the UCP has done itself no favours in engendering trust that it will follow through with any of its massive financial commitments.
Late last week, Ms. Gondek sent a letter to the province that read at once like an olive branch and an ultimatum. It said the two levels of government need to “preserve existing work” on the project, and “time is of the essence as the wind down progresses.”
The high-stakes game of chicken continues. But after all this time and money spent, Calgarians deserve much more accountability from political leaders on the Green Line than they’re getting now.