SHAMEFUL CONDUCT
We couldn’t blame philanthropist Don Taylor if he didn’t feel like making any more contributions to the well-being of this city he’s done so much for, after the way he was treated during the neighbourhood scrap over the piece of parkland adjacent to his Hillcrest Avenue home in the Mount Royal-Cliff Bungalow area. The trolls were out in full force online and elsewhere, stooping to despicable and juvenile name-calling and saying that Taylor was greedy, a crook, and ought to go to jail.
Greedy? The man has given away millions of dollars of his wealth over the years, and much of that went to improve the quality of life in Calgary. A quick list: there was $15 million for the Stampede, $25 million to the U of C’s Taylor Family Digital Library, $40 million for the U of C’s new Taylor Institute for Teaching and Learning, and $20 million for Mount Royal University’s new concert hall. His generosity is truly humbling, and is something for which every Calgarian should be grateful.
Yet, the small-mindedness and nastiness was, shamefully, in plain sight in the dispute over the land. It was during flood reparations almost a decade ago that it turned out 3,700 square feet of land Taylor thought had belonged to his family for decades, was actually public land. Before the error was discovered, Taylor and the neighbours were told they had to pay for a berm. Once the mistake came to light, Taylor offered to pay his share of the berm anyway, which came to $800,000, if he could buy the land for another $150,000. He then said he’d give half of the land to the city, while offering to finance beautification efforts on the parcel for another $50,000. When he found out how upset the neighbours were about his desire to buy the land, Taylor then reduced the size of the parcel he wanted to purchase to 2,000 square feet.
There was nothing greedy, crooked or bad about what Taylor did. Mayor Naheed Nenshi was absolutely right when he said one of the “most disappointing times in my term was dealing with people on this issue. We could have been a lot more respectful.” He added: “We should be able to work as a community in a respectable way. We should not be moving to personal attacks on people. We should not be misleading our neighbours on what is going on.”
Nenshi’s comments were not directed at the community association, but at others who weren’t named. These folks know who they are. We hope they have the grace to be ashamed of themselves for not having behaved like mature adults who understand that one can have a dissenting opinion while remaining civil, and without launching a personal attack on the individual with whom they are dissenting and who deserves far better.