William McBeath of Save Calgary exposes City Hall’s corruption, including the Calgary Sun’s leaked column by Rick Bell, traced to former communications manager Vicki McGrath. Mayor Nenshi’s insults toward pickup truck drivers and $30M Olympic bid mismanagement—despite taxpayer rejection—highlight his dismissive stance on accountability. Supervised injection sites in the Beltline correlate with 45% more break-ins, 47% violent crime spikes, and a 250% drug activity surge, yet the city ignores broader harm like dealer proliferation and safety erosion. McBeath urges conservative action to protect home values and neighborhoods from fiscal recklessness and failed policies. [Automatically generated summary]
You're listening to a free audio-only recording of my show, The Gun Show.
You know the old saying that you can't fight City Hall?
Well, nobody told that to my guest tonight.
Joining me tonight is my friend William Macbeth from the taxpayer advocacy and municipal government accountability organization Save Calgary.
William and Save Calgary are trying to shine some sunlight into the darkest corners of Calgary's less than transparent City Hall.
And tonight we're talking about some of the broader and bigger issues that they've been watching in the last couple of months.
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Leak at Calgary Sun00:08:41
Safe injection sites, a leaker down at the Calgary Sun, and pick up truck driving cavemen.
We're talking about all the news down at Calgary City Hall.
I'm Sheila Gunn-Reed, and you're watching The Gunn Show.
Booker's mayor, Nahid Nenshi, has had a rough couple of months.
And I don't see it getting any better for him in the very near future.
That probably has a lot to do with Nenshi's resistance to admitting that he's even done anything wrong in the first place.
Late last year, Nenshi's dream of a legacy Olympics was squashed after Calgary taxpayers voted overwhelmingly at the ballot box to put the brakes on his expensive two-week long Olympic party.
No apologies were had for all the taxpayer money Nenshi wasted on that.
Then, just after the Christmas dead time in the news, our friends at Save Calgary broke a huge story.
They discovered that someone from the Calgary Sun was leaking columnist Rick Bell's stories over to City Hall in advance of their publication, allowing Calgary's secretive administration to have their spin ready before the news was.
Now new reports are out that show a startling increase in crime in neighborhoods where Nenshi's city council has plunked a supervised drug injection site.
Who could have suspected that if you build it, the drug addicts and the drug dealers and then the criminals would come.
And yet, again, no apologies to the communities that Nenshi's bad decisions are harming.
Then late last week, Nenshi put both feet and his legs up to his knees in his mouth when he said this to Global here.
People can talk about cruise shifts.
People can talk about water treatment plants.
You know, look, everybody's got skeletons in their closet.
I'm not interested in having that discussion.
What I am interested in is just helping everyone in Canada understand that we here in Alberta are not a bunch of, you know, F-350 driving cavemen, that we believe strongly in the environment and we believe strongly in the economy and we believe in financial and environmental prosperity for all Canadians.
Nenshi drew the ire of pickup truck drivers, regular Albertans, and even Ford dealers over that one.
And Nenshi still refuses to apologize for his insinuations.
There isn't much accountability happening at Calgary City Hall, but my guest tonight is trying his best to change that.
Joining me once again is my friend William McBeth from the Municipal Watchdog group Save Calgary.
Hey William, thanks for joining me.
I haven't spoken to you in about two months.
Well, we speak all the time, but I haven't spoken to you on the show since before Christmas.
And I cannot believe the amount of breaking news that Save Calgary is doing and just the amount of impact that you are making in the city of Calgary.
But really, sort of all over the place, because a lot of the stuff that Save Calgary looks into, it can be overlaid in just about any municipality in the entire province.
And you guys did something in early January that even the CBC was forced to acknowledge that you had done.
You guys had filed this freedom of information request that showed that one of Rick Bell, one of the last true conservative shoe leather journalists out there, you discovered that one of his upcoming columns had been leaked by someone at the Calgary Sun to City Hall so that City Hall had some leeway and the ability to spin the article before it even came out.
Why don't you tell us all about that?
Well, sure.
And it's always nice to be here, Sheila.
Two months, it's a long time since we've been on the show.
So over a year ago, a city senior manager named Mac Logan left the city of Calgary under fairly mysterious circumstances.
A mutually agreed upon statement of he resigned was released by both himself and the city.
But, you know, certainly it raised a lot of questions, especially for someone who had a salary, as it turns out, of over $300,000 a year.
And we wanted to know what we could find out about the terms of his departure.
Was he paid severance?
Did he, you know, what was the behind the scenes that the city of Calgary was prepared to share?
Because like always, the conversations about it happened behind closed doors.
Counselors even said they were left in the dark about it.
And this, of course, was the person overseeing Calgary's huge Greenline LRT program, a multi-billion dollar project.
So of course we were curious.
So we filed our FOIP.
A short 13 months later, it came back from the city of Calgary.
It was 582 pages long and almost all of it was redacted.
However, since I have no life and I enjoy reading hundreds and hundreds of pages.
Your life is government accountability.
That's your life.
Oh, dear.
Well, yes.
No, I mean, I should say, I think they made it so long in the hopes that nobody would actually read through it.
But I did.
And buried in the middle were a couple interesting things.
The first one, as you've noted, was a sung columnist, Rick Bell.
He had written a couple columns about this Mac Logan departure.
That was the name of the City Bigwig.
They called his column Dribble, and they said they didn't know why they even bothered sharing it around.
But in this case, it was a bit special because the column that was being shared with city bureaucrats had not actually been published by the Calgary Sun yet.
It was, and it had been written by Rick Belt, presumably shared around the newsroom to everybody who needed to see it.
But it hadn't been posted online.
It hadn't appeared in a newspaper, and it hadn't been emailed out to a media distribution list.
But the city had it.
And the city got a heads up on it from someone at the sun.
So that was a pretty serious leak for the Calgary Sun.
And certainly they were quick to say that that did not conform to the journalistic standards expected of Calgary Sun employees.
So whatever became of that?
Did somebody get fired?
Are they still undergoing an internal investigation?
Like, what's the news on the mole?
Our understanding, the Calgary Sun did do an investigation.
They posted an update to say that they had determined who the individual was and that appropriate action had been taken against them.
So Calgary Sun is a private company.
We can't get any really more details other than what they shared.
But I think it's safe to say that given the surprise and dismay expressed by Calgary Sun bigwigs, this was not something they were happy about.
And the question remains, why did whoever leaked the column do it?
Now, we don't know.
But what we can say is that a city communications capper named Vicki McGrath, who was the one who shared the column around, had worked for an undisclosed amount of time at the Calgary Sun, presumably in the newsroom, but maybe as an editor.
And it's possible that she had friends and colleagues still at the Sun who were willing to provide that information to her.
Why would the person at the Sun do it?
Well, I think a lot of media people are feeling pressure right now, a lot of cost cutting, a lot of job reductions.
And as I've pointed out, and as Safe Calgary's pointed out before, a job at the city of Calgary is a pretty sweet gig.
High salaries, big pensions, platinum benefits, the whole kit and caboodle.
It's possible someone was trying to curry favor so that down the line they could get a job at the city.
That's just one theory, but we think it fits.
You know, I think that that is probably the most likely theory.
We've seen how many journalists have been sort of gobbled up by Rachel Notley's government over the course of the last three years.
And media keeps shrinking and they can never really figure out why.
Politicians and Practical Workers00:04:20
But this is probably exactly why nobody trusts the media anymore.
And it makes me wonder just how often and how frequently this happens, like on a grander scale.
I'm sure it happens with Rachel Notley's government, things being shared from media to them before it even happens, likewise with the federal government.
I'm sure in some newsrooms, it's just a general order of business, but that's just me being a conspiracy theorist.
I wanted to ask you about Mayor Nenshi, one of my favorite Favorite people, probably yours too.
He doesn't like my pickup truck.
No, I guess, I mean, Shayla, I don't know what the female version of caveman is.
I guess maybe cave woman, but cave gal.
Oh, I think that's great.
I would get that decaled on your truck.
So, yes, no, it's true.
When discussing Alberta's energy sector, the mayor was talking about how we need to do a better job of selling the work that's been done on the environment, which, of course, I had to stop and laugh at because I think everybody who pays even the slightest bit of attention knows how much Alberta's energy companies have committed to environmental stewardship, environmental protection, and adhering to the most stringent environment regulations on the planet when it comes to energy development and exports.
So, I don't think we're keeping that a secret.
I don't think anybody who's ever read a single news article about Alberta's energy sector would come as a surprise to them that they're focused on the environment.
But the mayor felt that he had to reiterate that point.
And in doing so, he said, because here in Alberta, we're not all F-350 driving cavemen.
And some of us drive dodges.
Yeah, indeed.
I mean, I'm not, I'm certain that if he had the opportunity to take that back, he would.
He will never admit that, of course, because the mayor does not admit when he's wrong.
But what an insulting thing, of course, to say to the many people in Calgary and outside the city who use F-350s to haul tools, to haul equipment to work sites, who use it because they work in agriculture, they work in the skilled trades, or who, by the way, have to occasionally drive somewhere outside of the city limits.
And sometimes those roads can get a little bit snowy.
I mean, maybe the mayor hasn't noticed it's freezing cold right now.
And sometimes you need a vehicle that can help you get across less than perfect terrain.
We can't all drive Priuses here in Alberta.
Yeah, you know, and when your Prius hits the ditch, you're praying to God or whatever deity you pray to for some caveman in an F-350 to drive down that road.
I just, it's so pretentious.
It echoed Rachel Notley's embarrassing cousin sentiments to me.
It just felt exactly the same that there are politicians, unfortunately, our most powerful politicians in this province who look down their nose at people who work with their back in their hands to build the things we need to be a province and who feed us.
And I just, as someone who drives a bigger vehicle than I need most days, I just, I don't want to say I found it offensive, but it really showed Mayor Nenchie for who he really is.
It feels like the mask slipped for a second.
It's an absolutely condescending statement.
And of course, some of us took some pot shots back saying, well, I'm sorry, your worship, that we're not all your aristocratic friends at the IOC who like to eat caviar, drink champagne, pay for by taxpayers.
Some of us have to go out and do tough, hard work in order to pay our bills and to make ends meet and to create all of the things that people in cities need.
That, you know, your house doesn't drywall itself.
Your plumbing doesn't repair itself.
Your food doesn't grow itself.
These are all things that have to be done by people and they can't drive smart cars all of the time in order to get it done.
So absolutely.
And if you think about it, so we're now cavemen, embarrassing cousins, and sewer rats.
That's what those of us who support fiscal responsibility appear to now be in the eyes of our city and province elite.
Suffering and Safe Injection Sites00:07:35
You know, there's another thing that I see that's going on in Calgary.
It's going on in Edmonton, too.
I think it's going on in some of the more progressive cities across the country.
Now I think it's bleeding into the United States and that those are supervised injection sites.
And as it's turning out in Calgary, these things are becoming like a black hole that attracts societal problems, whether it's open drug abuse, needles on the ground, open prostitution, gangs are moving into the area.
In Calgary, it's turning out that all those things that were the supervised injection sites were promised that they would address and alleviate, they're actually now being concentrated in these low-income neighborhoods, and especially neighborhoods that are going out of their way to try to, what's the right word, gentrify, to sort of rebuild themselves and become cute older neighborhoods with bigger yards.
Now they're just being where everything is being concentrated.
And I don't like the fact that these neighborhoods are often painted as people who just say, not in my backyard, but certainly not in the more expensive backyards of municipalities.
And I think there's a reason for that.
You know, it's interesting.
Six or so months ago, Tristan Hopper, who's a journalist out of Edmonton, you know, talked about how he moved to Edmonton.
And one of the reasons his wife was so happy about the move, she had lived in Vancouver, was the streets weren't strewn with used needles.
And that was a real selling point to her.
And it's why they wanted to raise their kids in a city like Edmonton, because they knew that when their kids were playing in a park or walking to and from school, there wouldn't be the risk of a used, dirty syringe lying on the street that could either pose a problem if they picked it up or just stepped on it.
And he was lambasket by the politically correct crew who said, oh, you just want to kill drug addicts.
And Tristan said, no, but I am worried about my community and I'm worried about my family, which in my opinion isn't an unreasonable worry for someone to have.
Now, certainly here in Calgary, we feared that safe injection sites, legalized drug injection sites, would result in a spike in crime, would result in property damage, would result in violence, and would result in used needles being found by people of members of the community on their property.
And it turns out every single one of those things was true.
A police report that just came out said there's been a 45% increase in break and enter reports.
There's been a 47% increase in violent crime reports and a whopping 200, nearly 250% increase in reports of drug activity to the police line around the safe injection site.
And now there are needles.
There are needles being found on church property grounds.
There are needles being found on sidewalks, in parks.
And I asked myself, why did the city not do its due diligence in thinking about in our beltline community, which is where this site is located, they've spent a ton of money reinvesting in that community to make it a place where people want to live and work and raise their families.
New condo construction, new businesses moving in.
And then they undermine those efforts by putting a safe injection site right in the heart of it with inadequate police and community support to make sure that these issues are dealt with effectively.
So now the city is left scrambling to come up with an answer to this problem, a problem that they created by rushing to get put these sites in without thinking about all of the consequences that have happened in other cities.
Well, that's the thing too.
Like there are lots of other examples that the city of Calgary could have studied and come to the conclusion that this actually doesn't work from a neighborhood impact perspective.
And from what I understand, the city of Calgary was proposing like a mobile supervised injection site, like a roving needle van.
Is that true?
You know, they looked at some of the things.
The mystery machine maybe was something that they were going to consider as an option.
But to us, I in no way oppose trying to help save lives of people who are deeply afflicted by addiction and illness.
I don't think that can be done at the expense of safe communities and safe families.
And certainly not if you lose the support of the community around the safe injection site, which is what's the case here in Beltline.
In fact, I'm about 200 meters from the safe injection site in the office that I am broadcasting from.
And there has been a noticeable increase in vagrancy, in drug dealers who are profiting off the suffering of others.
And, you know, to me, I just think, why rush in to fix part A of the problem, the problem of people overdosing and dying from it, without thinking about parts B, C, and D, getting rid of the drug dealers, cutting down on the supply of illegal narcotics, enhancing police safety, police presence and security around these areas so that they don't deteriorate into crime zones and enacting real punishments for people who commit violent and property crime,
which is something that destroys all of the work being done to try and revitalize a community like Beltline.
You know, I feel like there's a broader societal question here, even greater than the municipal one, that you don't want the scourge of this sort of activity in your neighborhoods.
I don't know when we moved away from getting people clean and productive and happy and contributing to just making sure they stay alive.
I think that that isn't good enough.
And I think that is the bigotry of low expectations that we're laying on drug users.
I think that they too want to be happy, clean, successful people.
And I don't think that municipalities should really be enabling the lowest expectation for these folks that are clearly suffering.
I absolutely agree with you.
I actually think it's immoral to allow people to just merely exist in a miserable state of being because they're so addicted, they're so poor, they're homeless, and they have no ability to actually get to a kind of quality of life that we would consider a minimum for people living in a rich, affluent society like we're in right now.
And to make the claim that 800 lives have been saved, well, okay, they're still living, but I wouldn't say their lives have been saved if they're still homeless and if they're still addicted and if they're still in pain and if they still have mental health issues that have not been addressed, that is not saving a life.
That is prolonging suffering.
And I think that is just morally wrong, the wrong standard for us to maintain.
You know, if you were a family who was experiencing drug abuse within the family, oftentimes the advice given to the family is to no longer enable the addict, to let them fall down.
And instead, municipalities are continuing to enable the addict, which is something that we, like families, would never do.
Olympic Bid Disappointment00:09:46
And I'm not saying, good Lord, you don't want the government to be your family, but I don't think they should play a part in enabling people to, like you said, continue to languish in suffering and pain.
Now, Moving away from such a terrible, terrible, sad topic to one of fiscal irresponsibility, I wanted to ask you because the Olympic bid or the end of the Olympic bid was one of the greatest successes of Safe Calgary, I think, to date.
And I wanted to know if there are any sort of outstanding financial issues lingering around just how expensive the pursuit of the bid was in the first place, the bid that thankfully never proceeded.
The bid committee, which is being wound down, has committed to releasing how they spent the 30 million, approximately 30 million that was allocated to them for the bid.
We don't have that information yet.
One development we do have is that the province has, again, I've said I've rarely ever given Rachel Notley's NDP government credit over their nearly four years in office.
But when it came to these Olympics, they were the most fiscally responsible government partner in terms of making sure that money was well spent.
The province has actually asked for their share of the money of the bid money back, saying, look, it didn't go ahead.
This was your process.
We committed to funding a bid and there was no bid.
So could we please have our have the share of Alberta tax dollars that they sent?
Could we have it back?
And the city, of course, is gawking at this request saying, no, no, we've spent it.
But how do you spend the money for a bid that never actually proceeds?
Is I think a serious question that people have.
And I'd be interested to know, if they did spend the full 30 million, who got that money?
You know, who was put onto payroll?
Which companies were hired to do the printing and the consulting?
And the city loves its consultants.
It has an army of them on contract at all times.
And I'd like to know for those Olympics, are any of those people people with close ties to either the mayor or to other establishment and elite people at City Hall?
Was this just an exercise to give money to some friends of the political elite here down at City Hall?
That's my question.
And we're going to wait for that big report to be released.
And if they don't follow through with that, I guess Safe Calgary will know what its next FOIP activity is.
Well, I mean, if reading government documents is your life and I feel like it's mine some days, I think you're in for a real treat when that report comes out, because I think there are going to be a lot of tentacles to that octopus, that I think it's going to be up to SAFE Calgary to put the pieces together and really frame the Olympic bid pursuit for Calgary taxpayers,
because I don't think that you're going to get it put into any sort of real context outside of that.
You know, it's interesting.
The money spent was, of course, one resource that the city committed to the Olympic bid.
And I'm actually going to suggest it wasn't the most important one.
The other resource it committed was time.
For the better part of a year, this was the focus of our city's senior administration and our city government, city hall and city council, to the detriment of everything else.
All sorts of things were not focused on because the Olympics became the end-all deal.
As we've talked about before, Calgary homeowners are facing the prospect of a catastrophic increase in their property taxes in order to make up for the shortfall of money coming from Calgary's now vacant downtown towers.
The other group was going to get his small businesses.
This seemed to come as a complete and total surprise to city council, who only looked at the issue briefly at the end of the year.
Well, we all saw this coming.
25% vacancy rates in our downtown core weren't an overnight surprise.
But where was council's attention?
Well, it was on the vanity project of the Olympics.
So while I'm upset about the money, obviously, I'm more upset that we didn't spend the kind of time necessary to figure out real solutions to the problem of our city's finances.
And now homeowners and small businesses are going to be the ones who pay the price on that with huge double-digit tax increases.
Yeah, you're right.
That really is a snowball that we have really yet to see how large it's going to get down the road because raising property taxes won't do anything to fill those downtown Calgary towers back up.
It's actually going to deter people from moving back into those vacant towers, but the city is so short-sighted that they don't know another way to make up the shortfall.
Whereas I would just say cut spending.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
Now, sorry, go ahead.
Oh, I was just going to say that, but, you know, cutting spending, though, in a smart way takes time and it takes careful review of budgets of money spent versus outcome achieved, all of those things.
And none of that was done because we were going to have a big winter party.
So that's where the time of detention went.
Instead of finding ways to save Calgarians money, we became or some of our council became enamored with the idea of hosting the global elite at a two-week VIP party that was going to cost $5 billion at least.
William, I want to give you a chance to promote Save Calgary and the great work that you do because you really are just this little organization that is punching up and changing the conversation.
So how can people find you?
How can they support you?
And what's the best way for them to find out what's on the Save Calgary horizon?
Well, I had to laugh about punching above our wake.
I understand that one city councilor, we have something called question time at City Hall here where councilors can send.
Did you call it City Hall or City Hell?
Oh, I heard which works.
You know, either or.
But I understand that one city councillor may have asked the city administration several pointed questions about our little Save Calgary group because she has felt kind of under the gun from all of the work that we've done.
So we're excited that we're causing a little, we're making sitting at the gravy trough a little bit less fun for some of our counselors.
To support Save Calgary, the best things you can do are go to our website, savecalgary.com, sign up to our weekly email newsletter.
And then if you like the content that we're putting out, if you believe that the issues that we're raising are important, and if you think that there's really no other group out there trying to push fiscal responsibility at City Hall, then we hope that you would consider giving us a financial donation through our website so that we can keep doing the FOIPs.
We can keep covering city halls in and outs, you know, when they're raising your taxes or when they're hiking spending or when they're, you know, hiring even more bureaucrats to mismanage our city government.
These are all things that we try and pay attention to.
So if you could see your way to giving us a financial donation through our website, savecalgary.com, that would be swell.
William, I want to thank you so much for coming on the show.
We can't let it go two months before you come back on the show.
That's far too long.
But I want to thank you for being the, sometimes it feels like the only people standing in between municipal government and taxpayers' wallets.
So I want to thank you and I want to tell you to keep fighting.
Well, thank you, Sheila.
It's always a pleasure to be on your show.
And yes, we'll have to do this more often, hopefully next time when it's a little bit warmer out.
You bet.
Thanks, William.
Thanks, Sheila.
As a society, I don't think we give municipal politics the scrutiny and attention it deserves.
Municipal politics aren't just about fixing potholes and picking up the garbage, although it is true that if neither one of those things happens efficiently or properly, your quality of life is really harmed.
A bad municipal policy, let's say like supervised injection sites, has the ability to make what is often the average Canadian's single largest investment, their home, worth much, much less.
And that policy has the ability to make your neighborhoods much, much more dangerous, nearly instantly.
I know I say it all the time, but a long time ago, it feels like conservatives just abandoned the battleground of our local towns and neighborhoods for provincial and federal politics.
But if as conservatives we want to change society for the better, we need to start our efforts much closer to home.
And for that reason, I'm grateful to groups like Safe Calgary for trying to start the conversation.
I hope they serve as an inspiration that encourages other municipal watchdog groups to pop up all over the country.
Lord knows we need them.
Well, everybody, that's the show for tonight.
Thank you so much for tuning in.
I'll see everybody back here in the same time, in the same place next week.