Calgary catches arena fever, but cooler heads prevail

So the debate on a new arena for the NHL’s Calgary Flames has been placed in cold storage with a civic election pending on Oct. 16. As someone who lives and pays taxes in Edmonton, I have been mesmerized by this now-suspended process of replacing an Alberta sports facility that is younger than the actress Kate Mara. We gave Calgary a case of New Arena Fever by constructing a new downtown arena mostly for the Edmonton Oilers, using the city’s access to government borrowing rates and tax increment financing to pull it off.

We are assured up here in the capital that the financial plan is working, although I own property in the area whose rocketing assessment values are supposed to pay for the rink, and so far I am personally taking a rather chilly bath on it. (This is somewhat ironic, since the managers of the new building haven’t quite learned to make good ice in it yet.) It is, for now, a matter of faith. The fiscal burden is not supposed to fall very heavily on the residential part of the tax base anyway, although us bourgeois downtown suckers might still wonder why the magic spell isn’t working.

The Flames exploited the rivalry between the cities to present their own pitch to Calgary’s city government, and this is what makes the process extra intriguing to me, as a student of that “rivalry.” People in Edmonton and Calgary think of the cities as being very different, but even as a person of depressingly limited travel experience, I think they are more like a pair of twins, in whose own eyes every trivial distinction seems absurdly exaggerated.

Edmonton and Calgary play complementary economic roles, and they feel the effects of changing oil prices and other global conditions in the same way, with some lag between them. There is no event that can conceivably leave one city a loser and the other a winner, although with the last few years of sluggish oil prices, Edmonton was certainly fortunate to have a New Democratic government in place to protect its public-sector jobs. The cities’ overall size has kept pace fairly closely since the Second World War, and provincial governments face a powerful, parent-like duty to treat them even-handedly.

So the contrast between the two cities’ arena debates is especially remarkable. Last month, the Flames’ CEO, Ken King, announced splutteringly that he was walking away from arena negotiations with the city. This was followed by veiled threats of a type very familiar in Edmonton. NHL commissioner Gary Bettman was brought onto the stage, frowned theatrically, and said that the Flames would “hang on” in the Scotiabank Saddledome “as long as they can.” (Insert your own sarcastic musings about whether an NHL team can manage to survive in the Dominion of Canada’s wealthiest big city.)

City council responded by releasing a careful explanation of both the financing deal that the Flames had asked them for, and the counter-proposal they had been prepared to proceed with. The two sides are perhaps not a million miles apart, and the city of Calgary is prepared to contribute to the construction costs.

What one notices with surprise as an Edmontonian is this: the words “two sides.”

Calgary’s government, you see, is actually treating this negotiation as a negotiation. This absolutely did not happen in Edmonton. Here, the question was simply how a cool new arena could get built, and city council gave way to Oilers owner Daryl Katz on almost every possible point, which is why Katz’s upfront cash contribution ended up being almost imperceptible.

But this was never presented or framed as “giving way.” It was infuriatingly difficult to even discuss the capital’s arena project, as if the Oilers, as a private business, and the city of Edmonton, as a steward of the public treasury, had genuine opposing interests.

Calgary’s arena discussion is already very different. The city is led by a economically sophisticated liberal, Naheed Nenshi, who is a skeptic of public funding for glitzy sports facilities that are not public goods. (How much does a hockey rink benefit people who do not consume hockey?) But its council also has a strong conservative component that “Redmonton’s” has never had, and these members seem no more likely to take on big fiscal burdens for the sake of monument-building than Nenshi is.

The civic election may juggle the council a little, but there are no initial signs that Nenshi is in any political danger, or that a new arena will even be a major issue. Even the enduring speculation that Nenshi was bound to move on to higher political levels—on the premise that any talented individual must naturally seek as much power as he can grab — seems to have dwindled. Bettman’s selfserving warnings are bouncing off Calgarian psyches fairly harmlessly.

It seems, in other words, as though the Flames will actually have to engage in a process of compromise, and appeal to the general public with convincing arguments, if they want to replace the Saddledome. So democratic. So messy. How can they live like that down there? Last month, NHL commissioner Gary Bettman said the Flames would “hang on” in the Scotiabank Saddledome “as long as they can.”