Trying to pick a winner can be a losing cause

Let’s face it, if you had a job where the highlights consisted of listening to taxi drivers whine about licences, motorists complain about potholes and snow-clearing, while everyone else bitched about sky-high taxes, then the chance, instead, to play monopoly with other folks’ grudgingly donated multimillions would be hard to pass up.

Of course, you could have run provincially, or indeed federally, and tried to get those itchy size 12s under one of the bigger spending tables of Canadian politics.

But that would mean joining an actual party and subsequently doing the work of a dreary drudge in helping some other candidate, higher up the political food chain, try getting elected while patiently waiting for your chance to grab enough votes and waddle up to the trough.

To heck with that nonsense — strike out on your own, get some campaign money from a friendly local home builder or two and set your sights on becoming part of that esteemed collective crew, otherwise known as Calgary city council.

Hey, if you make it and the stars properly align then it’s a gig that one day might even include oodles of free champagne and cold caviar to be enjoyed in those swish Swiss gettogethers laid on by the disciples of fiscal rectitude, otherwise known as the International Olympic Committee.

But the welcoming shores of Lake Geneva may remain on hold. Sadly, you just can’t trust the hoi polloi — that would be the common rabble for those readers without a classical education (you missed nothing other than abuse, believe me) — to deliver the correct verdict in the upcoming plebiscite.

Poof, there went a few billion in taxpayers’ money.

So, to pass the time, let’s play ‘pick-a-winner’ by doling out big bucks from that $100-million Opportunity Calgary Investment Fund.

A locally based company called MobSquad received the first grant of $1.5 million to help secure its plan to hire data scientists and software engineers to be based in our city while remotely beavering away on tech startups in places such as Silicon Valley (given the cost of real estate in San Francisco these days, it seems a reasonable idea.)

And this is just the first handout from the fund in a bid to diversify the economy. That has a familiar ring. Albertans who lived through the 1980s may recall how then-premier Don Getty was also a huge supporter of such plans. And how did that fare?

Yes, let’s hear it for NovAtel, MagCan, the Swan Hills waste treatment plant, Chembiomed and, who could forget, the remarkable Lloydminster Upgrader. Gee, whatever happened to those ‘winners’ and the jobs promised? Poof, there went a few billion in taxpayers’ money: that was a time when a billion bucks wasn’t simply a Joe Ceci rounding error.

Maybe MobSquad and those to follow will still be thriving in 20 years after indeed hiring the 150 Calgarians as promised. Certainly, we hope so.

But here’s the problem with backing future winners with public money. What damage did the raising of that $100 million cause to businesses already struggling to survive in our city?

How many jobs would not only have been created but would have actually been saved if taxes and regulations had been eased — to the accumulated tune of $100 million — so that those businesses already located here wouldn’t have had to shut up shop or cut jobs but instead expanded and, by doing so, taken on new staff ?

We will never know: such collateral damage takes place on a drip-by-drip basis, making it simply incalculable. But city council wants its play money. Yes, they will pick the winners even if it means other, much less sexy companies than MobSquad go to the wall due to the unrelenting civic bureaucracy they face.

Ah, but those J. Paul Gettys of the bike lanes, those J.P. Morgans of the garbage pickups, those Bill Gateses of the snow routes are determined to lead us to economic salvation.

Sure. But put their own money into something ? Come on, you’re having a laugh.