William McBeath of Save Calgary explains how 300,000+ voters rejected the 2026 Winter Olympics on November 13, dismissing claims of $7.4B economic gains and affordable housing fixes. He calls the pro-bid push "crony capitalist," criticizes Mayor Nenshi’s lack of transparency—including BIDCO’s $1M last-week spending—and exposes Calgary’s 700+ in-camera meetings, far exceeding Toronto or Ottawa. With a 12.5% property tax hike and rising public sector costs (42% wage increases since 2010), McBeath demands pension reforms and workforce cuts, blaming unions for resistance. The episode reveals how Calgary’s financial strain, tied to low commodity prices and federal policies, fuels taxpayer frustration over bloated municipal spending and mismanagement. [Automatically generated summary]
The city of Calgary just avoided having to host the Olympic Games.
Now, will this be a gut check to city council about their irresponsibility with taxpayer dollars?
We're discussing all that and more.
I'm Sheila Gunn-Reed, and you're watching The Gunn Show.
November 13th, Calgary's residents wisely voted against a two-week-long legacy party for their mayor, Nahid Nenshi, held in 2026.
In a municipal plebiscite, over 300,000 ballots were cast, with over 56% of them going against Calgary hosting the 2026 Olympic Winter Games.
Thank God, between IOC corruption and multi-billion dollar expenses that Calgary residents should not be forced to pay for, this is finally a real victory for common sense.
Calgary residents saw right through the pro-Olympic publicly funded propaganda being pushed by most of Calgary City Council and the yes side of the debate.
Now, will this whole expensive debacle that brought Calgary precariously close to a mistake that would have taken literally decades to pay off be a wake-up call for Calgary City Council?
Or does it just mean that now they move on to the next expensive pet project to be laid at the feet of Calgary taxpayers?
Joining me tonight to discuss how Calgary dodged the Olympic bullet and what's on the horizon next for Calgary taxpayers suffering through the very worst economic recession in a generation is one of the leading voices of the no vote side of the Olympic debate and a fearless advocate for municipal accountability, my friend William Macbeth from Save Calgary.
Hey William, thanks for joining me.
Now I haven't talked to you since the end of October officially on camera.
You and I talk all the time.
But first off, I want to congratulate you on being outmanned, outspent, outgunned, really out everything in Calgary up against, you know, the full forces of the city and the Chamber of Commerce, the business community, or rather the crony capitalist community in Calgary.
And yet you guys were able to register an overwhelming victory in the Olympics plebiscite.
So congratulations on that.
And why don't you give us a little bit of a breakdown of how that went?
Well, I mean, thank you so much.
It definitely was a great night for Calgarians who were concerned about the costs associated with these Olympics.
You know, Rick Bell, sun columnist, said it was a fight between David and Goliath on steroids.
And I think that's probably true.
We know that the yes side spent millions of dollars and had every piece of institutional support in the city.
But when it was left up to the common sense, everyday voters of Calgary, they made the right choice, the responsible choice to say no to the IOC, to say no to higher taxes, and to say no to an Olympics that Calgary, frankly, just can't afford.
It was really, it was phenomenal.
I watched it very closely and with a lot of interest, and it never really changed.
The The early voters, the advanced polls showed that the no side was winning.
And that held right through all the way to the very end.
And it was actually a much more decisive victory than I thought it would be.
So that, I mean, it's just phenomenal news and great work and a true testament to really the power of the people when highly motivated and well-informed in Calgary.
And I think you guys played an instrumental role in that.
Well, I mean, thank you.
And I would say certainly it was the first time that I think a lot of our establishment in Calgary, from big business to city council to all of the taxpayer-funded groups that exist like the Chamber of Commerce, really got a pushback on the part of everyday voters who said, we're sick and tired of you telling us what to think and what we should be doing instead of listening to us about what our concerns are.
How can we be talking about hosting an Olympics when we can't even plow the roads and fill potholes successfully?
Yeah, and I mean, it was the first time that the people who are footing the bill for these sorts of things got their say in how their money is spent.
And, you know, direct democracy is a wonderful thing.
We're just overwhelmingly thrilled that, first of all, we had this vote at all, because that was back in the summer.
That was by no means a guaranteed.
It was something, you know, one of the few times you and I have ever said something good about Rachel Notley and the NDP was the fact that they required a vote.
And then to watch the yes side become increasingly more frantic and flailing towards the end of the campaign when they realized that the promises they were making just weren't resonating with Calgary voters.
That Calgary voters didn't believe they were going to get a 10 to 1 return on investment.
That Calgary voters didn't believe it was going to boost Calgary's economy by 7.4 billion.
That they didn't believe that it was going to address affordable housing in this city.
Calgary voters said, we just don't believe you.
And we're saying no.
It was almost like the yes side didn't think that Calgary voters had access to the news or the internet or like Google to see how other Olympics had worked out.
It was really quite phenomenal.
Olympic Dreams Unfolding00:03:24
But this Olympics just won't quite die.
Like you just can't stick a stake in the heart of it quite yet.
There was some sort of banter around Edmonton City Hall that some groups wanted Edmonton to pick it up.
And that horrifies me.
Just as an Albertan, I don't live in the city of Edmonton, but it seems as though everybody ends up paying for these sorts of things.
So it sounds like that is dead and that was just some sort of idle musing, but you never really know with progressives, do you?
No, fingers crossed.
As I've said, one of the things that I would love to see is an Olympic cycle where no city ends up bidding.
I don't think you could send a stronger message to the International Olympic Committee that we want change, that we need to do business differently when it comes to the Olympics than if nobody bids for an Olympics one cycle.
I think that would be tremendous if that happened.
What a powerful message that would send to those oligarchs and aristocrats at the IOC.
Now, things are sort of getting back to usual at Calgary City Hall, back to usual, meaning back to the unaccountable business of Mayor Anensi.
You know, things as usual as wasting more money on hideous public art.
I hear there's another art installation going up.
It's $900,000 and it appears to be a wire mesh boomerang.
And it's one of those ones where you look at it and you'll never be able to tell if it's finished or if it's still in construction because it's just so ungainly.
You know, maybe that's the plan.
Like maybe that's the plan.
If they keep putting up all these art installations that look sort of like half-finished construction projects, it'll convince people that Calgary is starting to recover from the economic downturn.
But I guess when the weeds start growing up around it, that'll give away the secret plan.
Yeah, I, you know, I'm not against public art.
I don't think that, you know, I think it can, in many cases, help make a city more interesting and more beautiful.
But I fail to understand how our art committee is evaluating and choosing the pieces it does.
I mean, you look at our famous Beaufort Towers out west of the city, what looks very much like an unremoved part of a demolition site.
The outcry on that one was so loud that they canceled the second part of it.
And so, you know, now we're left with half of an art installation that everybody agrees is hideous, that they pretended had some sort of First Nations, you know, meaning until the First Nations came out and said, absolutely not.
So to me, I don't know.
They're going to have to have a really hard look in the mirror, though, because I think Calgarians are getting pretty fed up about what's being called public art and how much it costs.
Yeah, and from what I understand, this latest artist isn't even Calgarian, let alone Canadian.
No.
Apparently, in a province of 4 million people and a city of 1.4 million, we don't have any artists.
Not enough garbage artists.
Maybe ours are too good.
So maybe that's the problem.
Yeah, ours are producing things that people want to look at that don't give you vertigo when you stare at it.
Business Budget Cuts00:15:27
Now, I wanted to talk to you a little bit about what the final tally is for the Olympics, or do we even know what this like unyielding pursuit of Olympic dreams on behalf of Mayor Nenchi, do we have like a ballpark figure of what that costs the city of Calgary to pursue literally nothing?
At this stage, no, we don't.
There's been a direction passed that BIDCO, the company in charge of the bid, should release full and complete financial information.
But of course, Bitco is not subject to freedom of information laws.
So we can't have the same assurance that if and when they release numbers, they're going to be the full and complete picture.
We do know that the number is in the millions.
And I think the number is actually in the tens of millions.
I think we're well above $10 million just on the fall 2018 phase.
We know they spent over a million dollars in the last week of the plebiscite.
Their ads in this city were everywhere.
They were on the radio, they were on the television.
You couldn't go to a website without being bombarded by pro-Olympic things.
They had hundreds of paid people working in the final days.
So we know that the number is going to be in the millions.
I don't know.
We're ever going to find out what the full and complete number is from when the bid exploration committee first started its work through to when BIDCO finally stops all operations and stops spending money.
I don't know if we're going to get that number.
Oh, Lord.
And you know what?
We're just going to have to trust Mayor Nenchi because he never holds, well, not never, but rarely holds council meetings in a manner that is available to the public.
I think you would know better than I, but I think that Calgary City Council holds the most in-camera meetings of any city council in the entire country.
By a huge margin.
You know, the Manning Foundation did an analysis of how often Calgary City Council meets in secret.
And the number was over 700 times between the last two election cycles.
And to compare it to, for example, Toronto, who met in secret 18 times, that's one eight times, and the city of Ottawa that met in secret just once.
So Ottawa and Calgary, cities of roughly the same size.
Ottawa met in secrets one secret once.
Calgary met in secret over 700 times.
It holds the world record, as near as we can tell, for a meeting in secret.
In fact, they meet in secret so often, they've built themselves a new boardroom where they hold their secret meetings.
They happen so frequently, they need a dedicated secret meeting room, which some people have called Calgary's Chamber of Secrets, in order to hold their all too frequent secret meetings.
He has a secret lair, like Dr. Evil.
Yes, it's true.
Now, I don't think ours is in a hollowed out volcano, but maybe I haven't looked at the budget projections closely enough yet.
If they called it public art, they would put it in a hollowed out volcano.
Now, but I heard Nenchie is saying that he thinks the city is very, very, very well run.
Yes, I've heard him make that claim too.
I've heard him say that the Olympic bid process, which so many Calgarians objected to so strongly that they, you know, at the first available opportunity sent it packing, was a model for how other cities should pursue an Olympic bid.
And to me, that's mystifying given that this was a bid where they couldn't even get their other government funding partners on the same page until a week before the vote actually happened.
And even then, there was still a lack of clarity about who was paying for certain parts of the Olympics, where they had to be kicked and dragged in order to provide even the most high-level financial information.
And then again, they did not provide it by the one month before the vote deadline the council had set.
So, you know, to me, how can you call this a model for other cities?
I mean, maybe it is a model, but it's a model of what not to do, not a model of how to hold the most open, transparent Olympic bid process ever.
Now, thank God that's over.
Our provincial nightmare is over.
But that hasn't stopped Safe Calgary from hammering down on city council.
And you guys have some new and exciting initiatives in the works.
So, you know, what's interesting is, of course, the day after the Olympic plebiscite vote happened, the city released its proposed four-year budget.
And we discovered exactly how dire the financial situation is for the city of Calgary.
Possibly, some of us felt that this would have been a helpful piece of information to have before the Olympics vote, but it just, I guess, conveniently just came out afterwards.
And what it showed is that because of low commodity prices and how hard hit Alberta's energy sector has been because of the liberal, federal liberal failure to proceed with pipelines, we are not collecting a lot of tax revenue from the big downtown office towers in Calgary that we have in the past.
So there's a huge hole now in Calgary's budget and in Calgary's tax revenue, and that hole has to be filled.
And so, what they've proposed is a four-year tax hike plan that would see property taxes increase by 12.5% over the next four years and a transfer of the burden of taxes away from the downtown towers and onto the backs of families and small businesses outside of the downtown core.
In some cases, that could mean a small business is going to face a property tax increase of 25%.
And if the problem doesn't get any better, what that means is hundreds of dollars in property tax increases for families and thousands of dollars of property tax increases for businesses.
And you can only imagine how much worse it would have been if we had to pay for a multi-billion dollar Olympics on top of that.
Good Lord.
So what is Save Calgary's role in all of this?
What are you trying to do to affect some sort of transparency and change?
For us, the big concern is big companies and small companies and even families, when they encounter tough economic times, all do the same thing.
They look at what they're spending every month.
They look at what they're spending on things they have to have.
And then they look at what they're spending on things that are nice to have.
And then they cut spending on the things that are nice to have in order to make ends meet.
They prioritize because at the end of the day, a family has to pay its mortgage.
It has to buy groceries.
It has to put gas in the car.
These are all things it has to do.
But maybe it doesn't buy a new car.
Maybe they don't go on vacation that summer.
They tighten their belts in tough times.
And it's something that the city, in our opinion, hasn't looked at closely enough or maybe they just haven't accepted the reality of how bad the times are here in Calgary.
Because when the administration put forward its budget proposal, it contained a series of tax increase options on families, on businesses, on families and businesses.
But what it didn't contain was a meaningful spending reduction plan to make running the city of Calgary cheaper year after year.
And that is something that Save Calgary is advocating for quite strongly in this budget cycle.
Well, and, you know, it's tough economic times.
You would think that the city of Calgary with the vacancy rate downtown would be trying to encourage businesses to move into Calgary to replace that tax base to, you know, get businesses moving back into those empty office towers.
But nothing discourages businesses from moving into your jurisdiction like, I don't know, higher taxes.
You're absolutely right.
And when we were asked during this whole Olympic odyssey what our plan was, and we said quite simply, look, an Olympics doesn't fix Calgary's economic problems.
Boosting Calgary's economy by having private sector businesses set up and grow their operations in this city, hiring people, making investments, that's what's going to turn around the tough times here in our city.
And what you're doing, though, is sending the message that you don't want people to come here and set up businesses.
You want them to go outside of Calgary jurisdiction because taxes and red tape are too high for businesses to be able to operate here and still make money.
So for us, the concern we've had is the city has found some savings, and I want to credit the city for the work they've already done.
But the single biggest line item in the city's budget remains salaries, wages, benefits, and pensions.
And that's a number that's increased by 42% over the last between 2010 and 2017.
So in just seven years, the spending the city does on salaries, wages, benefits, and pensions has gone up 42%.
That is wholly unsustainable.
And so for us, we said, look, this is going to be an unpleasant conversation.
We're going to talk about some unpleasant things.
And one of them is we need to look at workforce reductions.
We need to look at salary cuts.
We need to look at how we make benefits more affordable.
And maybe that means employees shouldering more of the premium costs for those benefits.
And we have to end defined benefit pension plans for city employees because just like they have in almost every other case, those pension plans can bankrupt a city once too many people start drawing out money from them after they retire.
You know, and that is shocking when you say that it is over 40%.
When you compare that to the private sector business experience, especially in Calgary right now, I mean, it is appalling when public sector workers are sheltered from the reality that the people who are paying their salaries have to live with every day.
And these are tough conversations, but I don't know if Calgary can put off having this conversation for much longer.
Well, for us, this wasn't even, and it still isn't even on the table as something the city is considering.
They never presented this as an option.
And I have to tell you, they're also planning to still increase city employee salaries year after year for the next four years.
They've got agreements in place that they sign with unions, and they intend year after year to raise salaries, to raise benefits, and to maintain those pensions.
And I think for many Calgarians who have faced layoffs, who have faced their own salary cuts, who have faced, you know, not having any form of retirement assistance from their employers, they look at what the benefits that city employees get and the pretty good deal that city employees are getting.
And they think during these tough economic times, why am I paying more and more taxes in order to pay for a city workforce that we just can't afford?
And to give you a size of the number, the city of Calgary's budget is somewhere between $3.7 and $4 billion a year in total spending.
And salaries, wages, and benefits is $2 billion of that.
So one out of every $2 the city spends is on salaries, wages, and benefits.
That is shocking when you put it that way.
Do you know if the city of Calgary has seen like a hiring boom?
I know we saw that.
We see that still in Rachel Notley's government, that the, you know, there was a hiring boom in the public sector as soon as she took power and it sort of continued to mushroom and mushroom and mushroom.
Did or have you seen that at Calgary City Hall?
So right now, because times are so tough, city council has instructed the administration to restrain itself from adding new positions.
I don't know if it's a full hiring freeze or, but I do know that that's a message that was sent to the city admitted.
But I can tell you that over that same seven-year period from 2010 until 2017, 2,000 more full-time equivalent positions were added to city payrolls.
So we've added 2,000 more workers over a seven-year period.
And the amount of money we're paying for the city's bureaucracy has gone up 42%.
Neither one of those numbers is sustainable.
And I think not only do we need a hiring freeze, we need to take a serious look at how we can reduce the size of the city's workforce while maintaining services because it's becoming just too costly an operation for taxpayers in Calgary to afford year after year.
You know, and there are solutions that aren't scary, but for some reason, public sector unions are so resistant to them.
For example, attrition, just not rehiring somebody when they retire and finding ways to streamline or automate their job.
In the age of automation, you would think that there would be places, at least in the bureaucracy, that could become automated or jobs combined, but that doesn't happen in the public sector at all.
No, you're absolutely right.
We think that these changes should be implemented as kindly as possible, as thoughtfully as possible.
We're not calling for indiscriminate firing and salary cuts.
But I think the fact that this isn't even getting talked about to me is part of the problem, that City Hall and the Admin haven't really wrapped their minds around the fact that we have a structural tax problem now here in Calgary, that some of the people who have been footing the bill year after year just aren't there anymore.
And they're not going to come back overnight.
And so how are we going to make the city run without those hundreds of millions of dollars in taxes that we used to collect from the downtown towers?
For us, we think, look, if you can't have an honest conversation about these issues during a budget cycle, then when on earth can you have these conversations?
We're in the middle of a terrible economic slump.
Can't we have a conversation about things like transitioning new hires at the city to a defined contribution benefit plan or an RRSP matching plan, things that you find in the private sector, unlike defined benefit plans, which pay out at the same amount regardless of how much money is in the pension fund.
And that number will only escalate.
It was, you know, even a few years ago, we were paying out tens of millions of dollars in pension, and now we're paying out hundreds of millions of dollars in pension.
And I can only imagine what it's going to be like when, you know, a huge chunk of the city retires and moves on to those pension plans for 10 or 20 or 30 years.
It's horrifying.
Municipal Politics and Tax Hikes00:04:16
William, I think that's a great place for me to give you a chance to tell people where they can find Safe Calgary, how they can support Safe Calgary, and where they can educate themselves on this information about what exactly it takes to run Calgary City Hall a little bit more efficiently.
Well, thanks.
And I would say the biggest thing is please visit our website, safecalgary.com.
Please come to our Facebook page, facebook.com slash safecalgary, sign up to our email list.
Make sure that you're getting, you know, the other side of the story, the side that isn't being communicated by city administration, by the mayor, by his supportive counselors.
You know, there are some hero counselors on this city council.
I would say two of our favorites are Jeremy Farkas and Sean Chu, two people who have always tried to do their best for Calgary taxpayers, but that's two out of 13.
And so that's not a great ratio.
We want to make sure that you know how your tax dollars are being spent and the decisions the city is going to make that will define the future of Calgary for not just the next few years, but for the next few decades.
So for us, visit our website, safecalgary.com, sign up to our email list.
Hopefully you'll enjoy our weekly emails.
We try and make them a fun thing for people to read, although sometimes the news is so bad we can't make them that fun.
And we're going to be out there trying to offer alternatives.
And as we like to describe ourselves, big companies have lobbyists, special interests have lobbyists.
Well, we're the lobbyists for the everyday people.
So that's our role.
That's how we see our role here at the city.
You know, I love that because it is true, especially at the municipal level, there are not a lot of taxpayer advocates out there at the municipal level fighting for accountability and transparency.
And all politics are local.
If the garbage isn't picked up and the hubcap or your hubcaps are falling off because the pothole in front of your house is that deep, you know, people often don't make that connection between that massive check that you send to the city every year and the disrepair of your community.
They don't often make that translation.
And I'm glad Safe Calgary exists because you do that for people.
And your victory against the city in the Olympics is just a testament to your efficacy.
So, you know, keep fighting, William.
Well, thank you.
We made a joke in our follow-up email that said maybe they were hoping after we won the Olympic thing that we were going to go away.
And we pointed out quite clearly: no, we're not going anywhere.
We're here for the long term to fight for everyday Calgarians.
Well, William, I'm so glad you are.
Thank you so much for taking the time, all the time, to come on the show.
You have such a valuable role in Calgary.
And Calgary and Alberta and Canada really owe Safe Calgary a debt of gratitude for what you pulled off with the Olympics.
So thanks for coming on the show.
Thanks very much.
Always a pleasure to be here.
Thanks William.
Like I said to William, all politics are local and local politics tend to affect us first and sometimes the most.
Whether it's terrible roads and poor municipal services or an activist school board that disregards the rights and wants of parents.
I think Canadians should be as watchful of municipal politics as they are of provincial and federal politics.
We rightly raise hell about a federal and provincial carbon tax, but we seem to just take it all in stride when our municipal politicians raise our property taxes year after year because of their own mismanagement and over-inflated public sector salaries.
I think we need to be equally outraged about all tax hikes.
Well, everybody, that's the show for tonight.
Thank you so much once again for tuning in.
I'll see everybody back here in the same time in the same place next week.