Fixing potholes yields no glory but it’s essential

Now that city councillors have solved the conversion therapy problem, can they please do something about Calgary’s potholes?

Or is that too dull and dreary for their morally refined palates? Doesn’t saving our collective wheel alignments and suspension systems provide that same warm, tingly feeling?

Probably not. Better to save us from our brutish selves by providing a moral guiding star for those less enlightened to follow.

But hold on. See, there’s a nasty trap laid for anyone suggesting council get on with the real job it’s being handsomely paid to perform, instead of debating conversion therapy.

Doing so brands those questioning council’s actions, in voting to go after businesses coercing someone to change their sexuality, as heartless bigots.

Let’s spring that trap because it’s simplistic tosh. Most Calgarians actually would be appalled if some outfit were dragging folk into a chair and forcing them to renounce their beliefs or orientation — whether sexual, political or environmental — against their will.

So, by all means, pass a bylaw levying fines and revoking licences for any business doing such a thing. And if such action provides public support for a marginalized group that’s being bullied, then it’s fine with me and, I suspect, the vast majority of Calgarians.

Maybe councillors could provide similar solidarity with another marginalized and bullied group — ratepayers — by cutting their own salaries in a show of public support.

See, it isn’t the conversion therapy issue infuriating citizens. It’s that such motions are all we seem to get nowadays from council: virtue-signalling, unanimous agreements on morality hot-button items that, frankly, are far removed from our day-to-day concerns.

Instead, many more folk are worried about jobs, debts, rates and, yes, the admittedly rather mundane problem of not being able to drive down a city street without the trip becoming a mechanized equivalent of the Winter Olympics slalom event.

But let’s face it, there’s little reflected glory dealing with gaping holes in the tarmac, certainly not for our current crop of 15 civic leaders.

Hey, perhaps this week we can anticipate council passing a unanimous motion condemning those Uyghur re-education camps in China or blasting Donald Trump’s support for the drug hydroxychloroquine. The world’s their oyster when it comes to moral indignation.

(The previous council, on which most of today’s bunch served, even sent ratepayers’ cash to Haiti to help rebuild infrastructure after an earthquake. Maybe we can request a refund to help fix our potholes.)

Meanwhile, back in that challenging world most of us still inhabit, thousands of Calgary homeowners opened a certain letter from the city this past week. They must have felt they’d been slapped across the face with a wet kipper.

Because, after years of massive rate hikes on small businesses, it’s now residents’ turn to experience that full-meal Mayor Naheed Nenshi deal, in digesting burgeoning civic tax demands.

Yep, the council that pay cuts forgot also possesses the inept timing of a twice-busted clock. Of all the weeks to debate conversion therapy, picking the one in which annual rate demands were being mailed out takes some beating when it comes to boneheaded political moves.

As this health crisis adds to the economic abyss already on our doorstep, what more unwelcome news could there be than learning your rates are going up by an average of about seven per cent.

Yet even that tax grab won’t halt the city’s rapid budgetary unravelling. The exodus of ratepaying energy majors from downtown has never been solved. The financial hole it left looks certain to worsen in the year ahead.

Meanwhile, we’ve closed so many small businesses because of the COVID -19 threat it’s inevitable some will remain shuttered, given the onerous restrictions in place if they consider reopening.

That’s why people are getting increasingly cranky. Yes, ban conversion therapy. It’s the decent thing to do. But at least also show some progress on the other issues that mean more to most Calgarians’ everyday lives.

Because, literally and figuratively, our city increasingly appears in a giant hole right now.