We need to end the gloom and bring the boom

In a move that has shocked and upset many Calgarians, the Gray Family Eau Claire YMCA will be closing permanently. To people like me, this is still the “New Y” so to think of it being closed is a real blow, especially to our pride in our downtown and the vibrancy that we have always expected from our entire city.

It is now almost one year since we went into lockdown. It is almost one year since we started hearing that governments “Have our back” and it is almost a year since our downtown towers began to echo with empty offices and as people went home to work in their sweatpants and T-shirts. It is more than a year since our city council decided it needed to shift some of the tax burden from the downtown office buildings onto residential homeowners without really giving a lot of discussion to the fact that thousands of people living in those homes were out of work. It is more than a year since we fell into a deep recession that hit all citizens, including those who were paying the most taxes, shopping in the most expensive stores and buying the best restaurant meals.

I am tired of being told where to stand and having some bored security guard tell me to move six more inches away from the next person in line. Heck, I am even tired of just having to stand in line. I am tired of what I like to call “Rules on a Whim.” There has to be total

We need to settle down, focus on the future and get companies back to work. All of us need to get back to work, not at our kitchen tables or in our basements, but in real offices.

respect for our health workers and our healthcare leaders, but the constant drone of doom and gloom, the forecasts of sickness and the daily counts of death and infection are truly taking a toll. I think most of us are pretty cautious, but we really do need to start figuring out how to get back to work. We need corporate leaders to tell their people it's time to plan for the future, for growth and for prosperity. This will not happen while you are working in your bedroom office or showing off your latest Zoom background.

The best cure for poverty is for people to have jobs, producing things, selling things and planning things. We can reduce domestic abuse by making sure that women and men have paycheques and are not just relying on food hampers from charities that are also strapped for cash. The best way to make sure that young people are not leaving our city is by ensuring they have work to do. This city council and the next one must stop the social experiments and understand that its No. 1 goal is to work at building the business of this city.

The next civic election could be the most important in our history. At this moment, I cannot say which candidate for mayor I might support or which ward candidates I might want to encourage; but so far, I am not overwhelmed by the choices. We see countless meetings on television with civic groups that need money, facilities and food hampers, but how many meetings are our mayor and councillors having with corporate leaders? How many times are our councillors asking businesses, “What can we do, what do you need?” Recently one mayoral candidate suggested the city inject over $40 million from the rainy day fund to hold the line on taxes. My reaction was, wait a minute, we have $40 million stuffed away in civic mattresses? Why isn't the question, how can we hold the line on taxes for the next five years?

New projects should satisfy one question: What will this project do for business? Because it is only when businesses are booming that there are more jobs, that the grass gets cut, that the sidewalks get repaired and the snow gets cleared.

We need to settle down, focus on the future and get companies back to work. All of us need to get back to work, not at our kitchen tables or in our basements, but in real offices with real people and real enthusiasm.

Maybe, we even need to get back to the Y!