NENSHI NEEDS TO BE MORE LIKE RALPH
Transparency should be the watchword for the 2026 Winter Olympics bid process
My how times change. Back when Ralph Klein was mayor of Calgary, he was the one leaking secret documents to journalists about the city’s bid to host the 1988 Winter Olympics.
By contrast, Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi is trying to stop a leak at city hall by calling for an investigation to determine who passed along secret documents about Calgary’s latest potential bid to host the Winter Olympics in 2026.
Nenshi said the leak, which was first reported last week, was a breach of city council’s code of conduct and a contravention of rules under the province’s Municipal Governance Act.
“I will be asking the integrity commissioner to use his full authority to conduct that investigation, which includes a forensic audit of (council members’) devices, personal and city-owned, as well as email and text messages,” Nenshi said at Monday’s council meeting.
I have some sympathy for Nenshi, but a full investigation would be a waste of money and resources.
The real question that needs answering isn’t who leaked the documents, but rather why is there secrecy at all?
On Sept. 11, the Calgary 2026 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games Draft Hosting Plan was unveiled first in a media briefing and then to city council. In both unveilings, the word transparency was used to boost the bid.
Speaker after speaker kept mentioning how there are 40,000 line items in the budget and it’s all there for people to see. Except, this story proves that it’s not.
It took a leak to expose that there are some hidden costs to the Olympic bid that city council doesn’t want people to see just yet.
Last week, the CBC reported that the city has concerns about the risk of rising costs resulting from plans to locate the Olympic athletes’ village in Victoria Park.
The report, based on confidential documents authored by the city’s Olympic secretariat, says the city could be on the hook for replacing the Victoria Park bus barn and remediation costs at the site.
The athletes’ village would become affordable, attainable and market housing after the Olympics, something that is sorely needed in Calgary.
Forget about the leak for a moment. There is no way that an enormous bus garage should continue to be located in Calgary’s inner city right at the water’s edge.
It’s prime real estate. It should never have been put there to begin with. Moving this eyesore has been in the plans for the city for a long time but was never a high priority because the East Village used to be no man’s land for decades in Calgary.
Not anymore. Gary Bobrovitz, who recently retired from Global Television after almost 40 years as a respected reporter, recalls with a chuckle how Klein drove 1988 Olympic Organizing Committee heads Frank King, who sadly passed away in May, and Bill Niven, to distraction with his constant leaking of Olympic bid documents.
“Frank King and Niven tried to catch Ralph because they knew he was leaking documents but they couldn’t prove it, so they tried to number the documents and do little surreptitious tricks like that to try to catch him up, but Ralph would just white out the numbers and leak them to us,” said Bobrovitz, with a chuckle. Bobrovitz believes that Ralph’s motivation was to partly protect himself from political fallout should costs on the Olympics balloon, which they didn’t.
But it was also because Klein, a former television reporter with CFCN before winning the mayor’s chair on Oct. 15, 1980, was a believer in transparency. Secrecy implies that something ugly is being hidden.
That’s why there should be no secrecy on the bid to host the 2026 Winter Olympics. The suspicion is that one of only three councillors who voted to release the document are behind the leak — Sean Chu, Jeromy Farkas or Joe Magliocca. Maybe, maybe not.
The irony, of course, is that added transparency will help the bid, not hinder it. Everyone on the Yes side, who believes the 2026 Olympics would be great for Calgary and area (and that includes me) should have access to the whole bid, warts and all, prior to the plebiscite to be held on November 13. If small bits of a document need to be redacted, then that’s understandable, but this needs to be an open bid.
Times change, yes, but the validity for this Olympic bid is as strong as the one for 1988. The need for transparency is just as strong, too.
Klein knew that everything had to be on the table for all Calgarians to be onside. Surprises and secrets lead to suspicion. Transparency leads to trust.
Here’s hoping there’s a lot more trust and a lot less suspicion going forward.