Calgary Mayor Nahid Nenshi skipped the 10-day Stampede, a $400M economic driver for the city, to attend a Rockefeller Foundation conference in Rotterdam—criticized for its anti-Alberta oil stance. Guest William McBeath of Save Calgary accuses City Council of secrecy and fiscal mismanagement, citing cuts to fire/police despite 60% of staff earning over $100K annually while Alberta’s average salary is $60,500. McBeath ties Nenshi’s absence to broader distrust in leadership, warning taxpayers face unsustainable costs as Save Calgary pushes for transparency ahead of the 2021 election, comparing their fight to past successes like blocking the Olympics. [Automatically generated summary]
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Calgary Stampede is billed as the greatest show on earth.
So what was more important than the rodeo for Calgary's own mayor, Nahid Nenshi?
I'm Sheila Gunn-Reed, and you're watching The Gunn Show.
Calgary Stampede is 10 days.
It's held every single July, but it's more than just an epic world-class rodeo.
According to the Calgary Stampede Director of Development, Greg Newton, the Stampede brings in 1.2 million visitors during those 10 days in July.
Then the Stampede brings in another 1.2 million more visitors throughout the rest of the year.
Again, according to that same person, the Stampede brings in about $400 million in economic impact.
60% of that coming during the 10 days of the Stampede and another 40% rolling in during the rest of the year.
That's huge in an economically depressed city like Calgary.
But for the first time in a very long time, Calgary's mayor was completely absent during Stampede's 10 days.
Instead, Mayor Nahid Nenshi chose to go to a Rockefeller Foundation-organized resilient cities conference in the Netherlands, and he snuck away to do it.
I guess even Nenshi realized that there would be some serious criticism leveled against him for attending a conference hosted by an explicitly anti-Alberta oil foundation instead of the biggest event his city hosts every single year.
But really, is any of this any different than the normal secrecy from Nenshi and his friends on Calgary City Council?
Joining me tonight to discuss all this and a whole lot more is someone with a very close eye on the mayor, William Macbeth from Save Calgary.
he joined me in an interview we recorded yesterday afternoon so joining me now from calgary is good friend to the show willie mcbeth from save calgary
And we're going to round up all the things happening at Calgary City Hall and touch a little bit on some of the things happening on the federal politics realm.
William, thanks for joining me.
The first thing I wanted to talk to you about is, you know, it's Stampede season in Calgary, or Stampede has just wrapped up.
And your mayor was out of town for Stampede.
Where was he and what was he doing that was more important than the greatest show on earth?
It's a little hard to sort of explain Stampede for people who have never really experienced it, but for a 10-day period, it is sort of the only thing occupying Calgary.
And politicians from one end of the country to the other come to Stampede.
It is a must-stop event for anyone running to seek higher office.
And, you know, so Premier Kenney's been in town for the vast majority of it.
MLAs, ministers, federal MPs, federal political party leaders.
And yet the mayor decided it was a good time to not only leave Calgary, but to leave the country.
He went to a Rockefeller Foundation-sponsored resilient cities conference in Rotterdam.
And if you don't know what resilient cities mean, you're like the rest of us.
I've actually read the website, and having read the About Us section, I still frankly have absolutely no idea what a resilient city is or what a chief resilience officer does, but we're required to have one as a quote-unquote resilient city.
And yes, and the mayor left town, and the mayor didn't tell anybody he was leaving town.
He didn't tell any of his council colleagues.
He didn't tell Councillor Jody Gondeck, who was acting mayor that month and so would presumably have to take on some of the ceremonial responsibilities during Calgary's largest annual event.
So just what was so important in Rotterdam and why, once again, did the Rockefeller family pay for our mayor to go on another summer European trip?
Yeah, and you know, I've read some of the documents.
We filed access to information into the city of Calgary to find out exactly what a resiliency officer is.
I still don't really know, and I got back hundreds of pages, but I do know that the Rockefeller Foundation plays a role in selecting the resiliency officer, and they pay for some of the resiliency officer.
So you have the Rockefeller Foundation explicitly anti-Alberta Foundation paying for their person to be involved in the city of Calgary.
And, you know, for all the outrage about the Rockefeller Foundation and their foreign meddling in the ability for Albertans to get their oil and gas to market and how that problem has really just hit Calgary's downtown core, I think it is terrible that the mayor has chosen to spend his time with them as opposed to his city during arguably the most important 10 days of the year.
You know, I think for a lot of us, we don't understand what this whole resilient cities summit and program is all about.
There's very little information.
Certainly, we haven't got any detailed reporting back from his worship about what it is they talk about at these things, what are the benefits to Calgary.
And, you know, people are rightly concerned about foreign organizations interfering in our domestic political affairs.
The people who make decisions about how we're governed and what our policies are should be Canadians.
Certainly, who should make the decisions about how Calgary is being run should be Calgarians, not these large, well-funded international groups who may or may not be pursuing their own agenda, which doesn't have Calgary's best interests at heart.
As you rightly point out, the Rockefeller family across its many tentacles has supported huge amounts of anti-energy, anti-oil sands, anti-Alberta energy activity.
And what exactly is Calgary getting in exchange for signing on the dotted line and taking Rockefeller Foundation money to have this chief resiliency officer?
And why don't they ever just sit down and tell us in plain English what exactly it is that this organization is, what they want to achieve, and what the point of it is.
Why doesn't the mayor ever say proactively, hey, I'm going to Rotterdam next week.
You know, here's why I'm going.
Here's what it's all about.
Why do we only find out when he's on his way back from these sorts of events?
To me, it all leaves us with this idea that they're trying to hide something.
They're trying to pull the wool over the eyes of everyday Calgarians, just because this council has on so many previous occasions.
Yeah, this really is the most secretive council in all of Canada.
Now, speaking of the stampede, Trudeau did come to town, sort of.
His big stampede appearance was at a Liberal Party fundraiser where Trudeau said some, well, I'm going to say it, pretty crazy things.
He said that he thinks the Liberals will not only hang on to their seats, but actually win more seats here in Alberta.
And I just can't see that happening.
You know, it's possible the prime minister may have been out a little late one night at Cowboy.
He's had a few too many drinks, done a little too much line dancing, because it's clear he obviously lives in an entirely different world than we do.
There are three Liberal seats in Alberta.
There used to be four.
Of course, they lost one of those seats to a sex scandal, forcing that one to sit as an independent.
So three seats left.
I cannot see a way that those three Liberal MPs will get re-elected.
I mean, Kent Hare, he himself booted from cabinet and suspended briefly because of questions around his own misconduct.
Amrajit Sohi, who has championed anti-energy and anti-pipeline initiatives as one of our ministers, and frankly, only won by the narrowest of margins last time.
I mean, it was a real squeak through win.
And I guess the one who maybe they think has the best chance of winning re-election, Brandy Watsono at Evidence Center, well, he's up against a great candidate, great conservative candidate named James Cummings, who has been door knocking endlessly since the last election.
And, you know, was one of the people on the Jody Wilson-Raybould testimony committee on behalf of the Liberal Party and just had the most sycophantic, obsequious questions, you know, towing the Liberal Party line, hook, line, and sinker all the way through that.
And I think was even an embarrassment to his own liberal colleagues on that committee.
So I don't see, you know, far from picking up seats, I don't know how the Liberal Party retains any of its seats heading into after the 2019 election.
I think the Prime Minister just dreaming in Technicolor.
And you're right.
The only reason he came to Calgary was for a liberal fundraiser.
He did claim to have a Trans Mountain pipeline announcement, but every media who showed up to cover it realized it wasn't an announcement.
An announcement means new and meaningful information about something.
And he had neither of those things.
He had bromides and platitudes and talking about why he thinks the pipeline's important, even though they just appointed a star candidate in Quebec who is dead set against the Trans Mountain pipeline.
So like on so many other files, Prime Minister Trudeau has no credibility when it comes to either pipelines or Alberta's energy sector.
Yeah, that carefully staged photo op with Justin Trudeau in Sherwood Park with regard to the Trans Mountain Pipeline expansion.
Cuts and Police Officers00:05:44
It was held inside a facility, even though the weather was okay that day because there's no ground being broken outside.
So you can't take a picture where construction on TMX is happening because there is no construction happening whatsoever.
It was held inside a facility at the refinery where that's the terminus for TMX because there's just no work happening.
They keep promising we're going to have shovels in the ground, but there's none.
Let's go back to the city of Calgary because you and I have talked about this on every time we talk, really.
We've talked about the spending problem at Calgary City Hall.
And you and I have said, you know, like, look, City Hall has to get a handle on their spending.
And apparently the only place that City Hall can find to cut their spending is on emergency services, of all things.
It's the same old story, right?
For any big bloated bureaucracy that doesn't really want to make any cuts and does, frankly, thinks that cuts are heresy to civil servants.
They always go for the most popular, most beloved, most supported groups.
So who they go after?
They went after firemen and they went after police officers.
And you think to yourself, in a city employing tens of thousands of people with salaries, wages, and benefits in the stratosphere, they're so high and so generous.
Is that really the only place we can cut?
Is it really putting the lives of Calgarians in danger that makes the most sense when it comes to cuts?
You know, I would say, and the mayor, of course, who when several counselors expressed alarm that the cuts were going after, you know, emergency services and emergency personnel, several counselors said, well, we don't think that's the right way to go.
The mayor said, well, it's not council's job to second guess the cuts being proposed by administration.
And I would respectfully suggest, actually, it's entirely council's job as our elected representative to provide direction to a bureaucracy that, in my opinion, is completely out of control.
They seem to think it is them who runs our city and they're the ones to make decisions.
And they will just have to talk council into agreeing to what they want.
And I think Calgarians have had enough.
And if you look at a recent Think H2 public opinion poll, everybody seems to think, or at least an overwhelming majority of people, have a very low opinion of council as a whole's job record and of Mayor Nengshi as mayor.
And I think that's the message of we're tired of having bureaucrats, unelected, unaccountable, highly paid bureaucrats making decisions for us.
We will decide where the cuts are, not you.
And we will have an opinion on anything we damn well want to.
You know, we see this a lot from the left, from the political left, when a conservative or really anybody says, you know what, we need to be a little bit more responsible with taxpayer dollars.
You hear it from the NDP all the time.
All of a sudden, when we say, oh, you know, like, you know, we need to rein in spending, you'll see the NDP fearmonger and say, well, Jason Kenny's going to close schools, blow up nursing homes, euthanize your grandma, and close hospitals when, you know, there are savings to be made through, you know, attrition, maybe, spending cuts, rounding the pennies off.
It's not one or the other.
It always seems like there's this, you know, the left always goes for the worst case scenario.
And they introduced the worst case scenario in the case of Calgary.
I mean, when we see the kind of things that the mayor is willing to spend money on, we always bring up the atrocious art, but it is just such a perfect encapsulation of the mayor's priorities.
When he's erecting art that looks like literal garbage, but can only find money, can only find efficiencies at EMS.
We've got a real problem here.
I've never spoken to a Calgarian who is saying, you know, my streets are just too safe.
There are too many police officers on them.
Or, you know, we're putting out every fire way too quickly.
We should be cutting down the number of our fire departments.
But I do hear a lot of Calgarians saying, look, we seem to be spending an awful lot of money on things that just don't have any real beneficial impact.
We tried to hire a walking coordinator and a cycling coordinator.
And we do have eco-mentors who are here.
And now we have a chief resiliency officer.
So there's clearly places Calgary can find savings.
And so why should we just let bureaucracy run amok and say, no, the only place we can find savings is by putting the safety and health of Calgarians at risk?
To me, it's just a truly ridiculous statement from the mayor.
And it just, it's because he doesn't want to cut anywhere.
To him, the bigger the budget, the more important he feels he is, the bigger a deal he sees himself in the eyes of, well, the world, I guess.
He doesn't particularly concern himself with the opinions of everyday Calgarians, but he does really care what the elites and the globalists think of how he's doing.
So I think it's a real wake-up time.
And I'm told, unofficially, that there's quite a lot of disharmony sitting at city council right now.
A lot of counselors are feeling that the mayor has completely abandoned his role as leader and that, in fact, he is sowing the seeds of discontent and discord between himself and council and other groups.
Salaries Out of Whack?00:08:57
So I'm told it wasn't the happiest stampede for our city councillors while they were out meeting and greeting with everyday voters.
Yeah, I think there's a lot of buyer's remorse out there on the streets of Calgary with regard to Nenshi repeatedly being re-elected.
There's another thing that you and I talk about quite a bit, and that is the salaries at Calgary City Hall and at the City of Calgary in general.
CTV News Calgary has a new story out just, you know, we're recording this Tuesday afternoon.
It's about the compensation disclosure list for City of Calgary jobs.
I'm going to read to you just a little bit.
According to the latest findings, nearly 30% of employees make $100,000 or more each year.
22.2% of employees earn between $100,000 and $125,000 per year.
About 5.7% of city workers make anywhere from $125,000 to $150,000 annually, while 1.5% make more than $150,000 per year.
That's up near 60% of Calgary City employees making $100,000 or more.
Does that seem crazy or is it just me?
No, you know, it's interesting.
In the old days, whatever those were, back when times were booming, there used to, I think, be a trade-off.
If you went to a job in the private sector, you expected higher wages, but those higher wages came at the expense maybe of some of the benefits.
You didn't get necessarily a pension.
You might get RRSP matching in some companies, or you might not get any support.
You didn't have maybe as generous a benefit package for health and life and things like that.
And you didn't have the same kind of job security as you would.
So you took a higher salary in exchange for some of those trade-offs.
Conversely, if you worked for government, you accepted a lower salary, but you got great benefits, great pension, and tremendous job security.
But now in the world we live in, people who work for government are now being paid far more than people in the private sector.
So that whole traditional agreement, I think, has fallen away.
So public sector workers are now getting higher salaries, better benefits, tremendous pensions, and absolute job security.
And that just seems to be the opinion that that's what they deserve.
Well, respectfully, Calgarians in Calgary, the city, is still tremendously hurting.
And there's so many people still looking for work.
People who have found jobs are being paid a fraction of what they were when times were booming in our city.
And they look over at a public service who is still getting annual salary increases that is still increasing in size every single year and who hasn't seen a single dollar cut from any of their benefits or pension plans and has and even suggested that talking about the issue amounts to treason on the part of our elected officials.
And everyday people, voters who work in the private sector say, well, that's just not fair.
That's just not right that there's a protected class of worker who seems to get all of the advantages and higher pay.
It's time for a real conversation to happen about how much we pay people and how generous our benefit plans are for them, especially since we just can't afford the government we have anymore.
We have built a city government that our tax base cannot support.
So we're either going to have to dramatically cut services.
And if we leave it up to the bureaucrats, that means we won't have any fire and police service in the city of Calgary.
Just, you know, it'll be like the purge all the time on our streets.
You know, without, because we can't have an honest conversation about cutting workers.
So I don't know.
It's very depressing.
And I think everyday people are finally fed up enough to say, you know, we've put up with this for a long time.
We've let this problem get this bad.
It's time to turn the corner and take a new direction on it.
Yeah, I hope people are waking up.
I pulled the numbers just for the average salary range for Albertans in 2017.
And I know that's calculated, of course, a little bit differently.
But the average salary range for an Albertan in 2017 was just a little under $58,000.
So when you see roughly 60% of Calgary city employees making over $100,000, that seems a little bit out of whack with the reality on the ground for many Albertans in this terrible economy.
William, I want to thank you so much for coming on the show, but I also want to give you the opportunity to direct people to the good work that you do at Safe Calgary and let people know how they can support you.
Oh, well, thanks, Sheila.
We always appreciate having an opportunity to come on your show and chat with you because we know that you, unlike so many of our media friends, are actually someone who believes in sensible government and fiscal responsibility.
So Safe Calgary, the best ways to get involved and to help us out, if you're concerned about the direction of our city and you're concerned about the behavior of our council, I would ask you to do a few things.
One, please check us out on our website, safecalgary.com.
Check us out on Facebook.
Check us out on Twitter.
We generate and push out content daily.
We also put out a weekly sort of newsletter about what's been happening at City Hall.
I'm told that behind the scenes, the city is even looking at ways they might be able to stop us sharing that information.
They frankly find it embarrassing for us to be focusing on some of their missteps and pointing out their actual records.
So that's a little, you know, you know, you're doing good when you get your opponents trying to actually kick you off the air.
So sign up to our site, sign up to our pages, support us on social media.
The second way is if you can, you know, we're not a publicly funded organization.
We don't have tax dollars to splash around on conferences and on pet projects.
We rely on the support of everyday Calgarians financially.
So if you can, please, and it's hard because I know the city bureaucrats have squeezed every last dollar out of your pocket, but if you can, a small financial donation to help us support our work would be hugely appreciated.
Again, you can donate through our website, savecalgary.com.
And, you know, we're really starting to gear up for 2021.
We think that will be a critical election for Calgary.
We want Calgarians to have real choices to really understand what and who they're voting for and the consequences of simply staying with the same team of people who got us into this mess in the first place.
So that's become our new focus.
And we really want everyone to join with us in helping to bring about real change down there at City Hall.
Yeah, you know, with what you were able to do with just a shoestring budget in the No to the Olympics campaign, I think that's really a testament to just how far the folks at Save Calgary can stretch a dollar because you were outmanned, outspent, outgunned, and you still won that and saved City of Calgary taxpayers and really all Alberta taxpayers from the financial catastrophe that Olympics would have been.
William, I want to thank you so much for being so generous with your time, as always, and we'll have you back for sure in the very near future.
Thanks so much, Sheila.
In the interest of accuracy, I need to correct something that I said.
In my interview with William, I cited a bit of a wrong number, but just barely, and it doesn't change the point that I was trying to make anyway.
According to payscale.com, the average salary in Calgary is about $60,500 per year.
When I was talking to William, I said it was closer to $57,000, but that's just the number for Edmonton.
But the point remains that all those administrative positions that are earning well over $100,000 per year to work for municipal governments pay anywhere from $43,000 to $83,000 per year for the same job in the private sector.
And that's a problem for taxpayers who have to bear this unsustainable burden of these completely out-of-whack public sector salaries.
Well, everybody, that's the show for tonight.
Thanks so much for tuning in.
I'll see everybody back here in the same time, in the same place next week.