VOTERS WILL HAVE THE FINAL SAY AS PLEBISCITE CAMPAIGN LAUNCHES
“Calgary spends $390 million — and Calgary gets more than $4 billion in return.”
The words are from Mayor Naheed Nenshi. Get used to them. He’ll sing them like an anthem until the Nov. 13 plebiscite on Calgary’s proposed Olympic bid.
Nenshi calls the funding framework with the province and Ottawa “an incredible deal, an absolutely amazing deal for Calgary, the best I could have hoped for.”
The mayor hasn’t said anything like that before, because there wasn’t a funding arrangement before. He confined himself to stating that he wasn’t so much pro- Games as pro a great financial deal.
Now he’s pro both. “Everybody knows I love the Olympics,” he says. He promises to be everywhere with that message for the next two weeks.
So, the plebiscite campaign is on. It will be short, intense and expensive.
Calgary’s bid corporation, Calgary 2026, says it will spend $200,000 on advertising from this point until the vote. The total spending, going back to Sept. 11, will be $1 million.
Those numbers, clarified in council Wednesday, will enrage the No forces.
They call Calgary 2026 biased. To that, Coun. Jyoti Gondek snapped that the bid corporation’s job is to develop and promote a bid. “It’s called BidCo, not the NoBidCo.”
The stakes are incredibly high. The provincially funded plebiscite isn’t binding in law, but it is in fact.
That’s because both the federal and provincial governments say their offers are void if the No side wins even by a single vote. More than $2.1 billion would be off the table.
The referendum itself is a simple, aspirational thing, not a vote on the terms of a funding framework that became public Tuesday night.
The ballot asks only if voters are for or against Calgary staging the 2026 Olympic Winter Games. The voting choices are:
“I am for Calgary hosting ” and “I am against Calgary hosting.”
Council almost canned this vote Wednesday, even after councillors had the terms of the deal in hand.
Eight council members voted to stop both the bid and the plebiscite. That would have been a winning majority of the 15-member council in almost every case.
But because this was a “reconsideration” of an earlier decision, it needed 10 votes to pass. Eight didn’t get the job done, but it is still a solid measure of discontent, and a sign of the divisions ahead in the plebiscite campaign.
The strangest case was Ward 8 Coun. Evan Woolley, who chairs council’s Olympic committee and has always been a proponent.
Woolley voted to cancel the bid and the plebiscite. Afterward, he sounded like he’s already campaigning for the No side, saying he can’t support the proposal because the plebiscite is flawed by the very short period to consider the funding framework.
He said he also has serious concerns about the funding deal itself, partly because of questions city officials and Calgary 2026 couldn’t answer about such matters as insurance.
Woolley appeared genuinely anguished. So did other councillors. The issue has divided them as sharply as the city itself.
Personally, I think the fears about the short time left to the vote are overblown.
Many voters have their minds made up and won’t be swayed by any amount of information. The undecideds typically wait until shortly before any kind of general vote to focus their minds. Those people won’t face any shortage of data from both the Yes and No sides.
This is not a crisis. It’s almost insulting to voters to suggest they can’t make an intelligent decision in that time.
By the end of Wednesday’s long council session, Calgary 2026 CEO Mary Moran and chair Scott Hutcheson both looked like they were about to collapse with exhaustion.
The past week has been punishing for all the negotiators, who last Friday were cloistered in a city hall meeting room when word of a federal offer leaked out, lighting up everybody’s phones like little Halloween candles.
The province had its own reasons for insisting on the Nov. 13 vote. Mostly, the NDP wanted to set a high bar for offering so much money — $700 million — in hard times.
But it turns out that the vote is essential. It will be decisive, one way or the other. And Calgary can move on.
Personally, I think the fears about the short time left to the vote are overblown. Many voters have their minds made up.