City Olympic committee gets down to business
As city council’s new Olympic committee sat down for the first time Tuesday to hash out how it will oversee work on a potential bid for the 2026 Games, councillors heard that much of the group’s work will likely need to be conducted behind closed doors.
Key elements of the committee’s work, including determining a mandate for negotiations with other orders of government and selecting a chair for a bid corporation, aren’t able to be discussed in public, said Mayor Naheed Nenshi.
“A whole bunch of the work of this committee has to be in closed session — understanding that council makes the decisions, so everything will come to council and we’ll still have big riotous debates at council anyway,” Nenshi said Tuesday.
Nenshi said he disagrees with what he describes as the “narrative” pushed by opponents of the Olympics, that there have been problems with the transparency of the city-led work on the bid.
“We’re making all the sausage in public (which) means that every misstep gets massively magnified, every small error gets put out there, and a lot of people focused on those,” the mayor said.
“What I’m suggesting is, think about the big picture.”
At Tuesday’s meeting, committee members heard an updated timeline on the mountain of work still to be done before Calgary can decide on whether to proceed with a bid to host another Winter Olympics.
The $30-million bid corporation, or BidCo, funded by all three orders of government, has yet to launch and cannot begin work until management of the corporation has been finalized, likely sometime in August.
Of the 19 directors expected to sit on BidCo’s board — comprising representatives from Canmore, the provincial and federal governments, the Canadian Olympic and Paralympic Committees, and Indigenous communities — three will come from the City of Calgary.
Committee members went briefly behind closed doors Tuesday to discuss potential candidates to chair the BidCo, as well as three other directors to sit on the corporation’s board.
After some initial controversy over the proposed makeup of the committee, council has settled on a seven-member committee comprising six councillors and the mayor.
Coun. Evan Woolley was acclaimed as chair at Tuesday ’s meeting and Coun. Peter Demong was selected as vice-chair of the committee, which will meet every two weeks in an effort to meet the tight deadlines associated with the Olympics file.
Also on the committee are councillors Druh Farrell, Ray Jones, Diane Colley-Urquhart and Joe Magliocca.
Three members of the committee have previously voted against proceeding with the Olympics, the remaining members have mostly voted in favour of proceeding with a bid. Woolley said Tuesday he sees the committee, and his role as chair, as providing “some clarity” to the city’s work on a bid.