Unchallenged Nenshi creates own opponent
OCT. 21 ELECTION
cA LGA ry • The presumed leading challenger in Calgary’s mayoral race made it back to town just in time for Monday night’s candidates forum. He was in Kansas competing at an international BBQ championship and had previously said his commitment to brisket would force him to skip the debate. One fringe challenger, calling himself the Christian choice, warned Calgarians they faced hellfire and damnation for electing a mayor who swore on a Koran rather than a Bible.
And in the middle of them stood that incumbent mayor, Naheed Nenshi, not so long ago a scrappy, come-from-behind, long-shot candidate himself. He knows he is virtually assured of another term after the Oct. 21 election. There are opponents; it’s just that none of them currently poses a credible threat.
And yet, Mr. Nenshi has been acting like a man under fire. He has pointed accusing fingers at the Manning Centre for Building Democracy, and its affiliated foundation. He has implied that the centre, headed by Reform party founder Preston Manning, is part of something resembling a nefarious cabal; a think-tank backed by Calgary’s suburban homebuilders, desperate to wiggle its meddlesome, capitalist fingers into the local municipal politics pie. He has demanded the Manning Centre reveal its donors. He has compared their actions to the super PACs — the big-money stalking horses that have invaded U.S. politics. He has accused them of running a stealth slate of business-cozy candidates. “This is the corrosive element of money in politics,” he said this week.
If Mr. Nenshi needed a challenger to run against, he was not about to find one on the list of relatively weak nine mayoral candidates. The Manning Centre has instead become his bête noire. As it turns out, the centre may not be as antagonistic to Mr. Nenshi’s policies as he thinks. Or, at least as what he wants voters to think.
The pillar of Mr. Nenshi’s campaign strategy revolves around increasing developer levies to the tune of $4,800 per house. The levies had been eliminated entirely by the previous mayor.
Mr. Nenshi needs at least eight friendly aldermen to ensure he maintains control on council for the next four years. And it will be a crucial term; one in which the mayor plans to stymie the enormous pace of growth of the suburbs and encourage higher-density urban development in the downtown core — raising the price of suburban development being part of that plan. In an unprecedented move for Calgary politics, he has officially endorsed all the incumbent aldermen, evidently part of his defence against the powerful assault of the homebuilders.
Mr. Nenshi is right that the Manning organization has an agenda, though it does not appear to be quite the one that the mayor portrays. It has funded a lobby group, Common Sense Calgary, which warns of a Vancouver-style affordability crisis if city planners get their way. Manning has also published a series of conservative-tinged reports on municipal governance and Calgary’s city council.
Another report was released on Tuesday. To everyone’s great surprise, perhaps Mr. Nenshi’s most of all, Managing the Costs of Growth was hardly a radical prescription for laissez-faire suburban development. Written by Ben Brunnen, a policy and economics consultant in the city, the Manning report points out that Calgary’s tendency toward wide streets, big homes and spacious yards — all the blessings of open space, economic prosperity and cheap transportation — is an expensive luxury. Infrastructure for single-family homes costs more to build and maintain per capita than infrastructure that services higher-density development. Mr. Brunnen recommends a tax regime that puts the increased costs of that kind of development squarely on those who use it.
“What we need to be doing is moving away from taxing people strictly on assessed property value to taxing them based on actual use,” he said.
In other words, suburbanites who take up more space, require the addition of new infrastructure and services, and use more of the city’s roads, should be paying more of that cost, rather than some of that cost spreading to other ratepayers in the city. This analysis is not without its problems, but much of Mr. Brunnen’s report could have come right out of Mayor Nenshi’s campaign office. Mr. Brunnen even tacitly endorsed ending the implicit subsidization of suburban developments, and the $4,800 levy. “It’s a good thing if it’s applied equitably across all types of development,” he said. Mr. Nenshi was gratified, and yet proceeded to insinuate that the Manning Centre must have gone rogue, against its homebuilder masters.
“I suspect they got some angry phone calls from their donors this morning, but good on them for actually standing up for the correct free-market principle here,” he said.
But if the latest report shows anything, it’s how comparatively over-the-top the rhetoric had become in a campaign that had, elsewhere, lacked tension. There are developers unhappy with city council’s shift in tone, certainly, but even the Manning Foundation is acknowledging the city can’t afford to grow to the Rockies without a credible plan to finance the expansion. Absent a real fight, the mayor has been left to shadow box, dampening his own charm and perhaps with it his popularity, while needlessly polarizing urban and suburban dwellers in the process.