William McBeath of Save Calgary defends the Flames’ $500M arena deal as fiscally sound, contrasting it with Edmonton’s higher transit costs and Calgary’s $115K+ annual employee expenses. He slams the abandoned $5B Green Line LRT project—downtown tunnel scrapped after two leaders quit—and criticizes Trudeau’s ethics violations, including SNC Lavalin conflicts and his $6M mansion. McBeath argues supervised injection sites worsen crime (452% rise in police calls near Calgary’s Beltline) and demand stricter policing, not harm reduction. The episode frames 2021’s municipal election as a chance to challenge Mayor Naheed Nenshi amid conservative divisions over priorities. [Automatically generated summary]
You're listening to a free audio-only recording of my show, The Gun Show.
My guest tonight is William Macbeth from Save Calgary.
If you like listening to this podcast, then you will love watching it.
But in order to watch, you need to be a subscriber to premium content.
That's what we call our long-form TV-style shows here on The Rebel.
Subscribers get access to watching my weekly show as well as other great TV-style shows too, like Ezra's nightly Ezra Levant show and David Menzies' fun Friday night show, Rebel Roundup.
It's only eight bucks a month to subscribe, or you can subscribe annually and get two months free.
And just for our podcast listeners, you can save an extra 10% on a new premium membership by using the coupon code podcast.
When you subscribe, just go to the rebel.media/slash shows to become a member.
And please leave a five-star review on this podcast and subscribe in iTunes or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Those reviews are a great way to support the Rebel without ever having to spend a dime.
And now please enjoy this free audio-only version of my show.
Calgarians love their hockey team, but do they love the flames enough to build them a brand spanking new multi-million dollar arena?
I'm Sheila Gunn-Reed, and you're watching The Gunn Show.
The city of Calgary has just struck a new deal to replace the aging Saddledome Arena.
Now, conservatives are divided on the issue.
For example, Franco Terrazano from the Canadian Taxpayers Federation is staunchly against the new arena deal.
He says Calgarians shouldn't be forced to fork over hundreds of millions of dollars to the wealthy owners of a professional hockey team, especially when other Canadian teams built their own arenas.
We all want to support the flames, but with tickets, not taxes.
Now, on the flip side, municipal watchdog Save Calgary is in favor of the new arena deal, while at the same time taking issue with the manner and speed in which the city came to the decision to support the arena with tax dollars.
So, here we have two different groups of fiscal conservatives with two very different opinions on the new Calgary arena deal.
But the arena is not the only thing happening in Calgary political news, no siree.
Supervised injection sites are still creating a policing black hole, just sucking up resources and police manpower from all over the city.
And an LRT deal is approaching a $5 billion fiasco.
So, I need an expert in Calgary.
Joining me in an interview we recorded last week is William Macbeth from Save Calgary.
Now from Calgary, from Save Calgary actually, is my friend William Macbeth.
We've got so much to talk about happening in Calgary, and then I guess federally, this is whether the Liberals like it or not, election silly season.
William, thanks for joining me.
Oh, thanks.
It's always a pleasure.
So, big news: Calgary's getting a new arena.
Edmonton got theirs a few years ago.
You guys at Save Calgary, normally staunch critics of the public sector spending and the wasteful ways that go on at the city of Calgary.
You guys have made the conservative case for the arena.
I'm an open-minded person.
I would love to hear it.
I think our viewers would love to hear it.
So let it rep. You know, it's so interesting.
For our position on the arena, we've been asked for several years now, ever since before, in fact, the last election, where we stood on an arena deal, a new arena.
And we said, well, we'll have to see what the deal actually says.
Because as in everything, you can't judge something until you actually get a look at what's being proposed.
For us, our issue when we opposed the Olympics wasn't because we're just inherently against elite sport, but because when we saw the deal, we saw what was being proposed.
We thought it was a bad deal for Calgary taxpayers.
So in the case of the arena, this is the second deal that's been put forward by the negotiating team.
And so this time it's a 50-50 split between the Flames and the city for putting in the money to build it.
The city taxpayers retain ownership of it.
The flames have to pay rent every year in the form of a facility fee.
The city gets a ticket tax back from patrons who use the facility.
And even though economic development numbers are always anyone's best guess, the city is arguing that it will help spur economic growth in that region in downtown at the edge of downtown, which has been an area that they've been focusing on.
So leaving that aside, because of course we have some questions about how they've done their math on economic benefits.
But looking at the other side, it seems to be a pretty reasonable deal for getting a new arena, which will ensure the flames remain in Calgary for the next 35 years.
I think one of the things that was concerning for, say, Calgary, what would Calgary be if we lost our home hockey team?
Well, we'd be Winnipeg, as it was back in the day.
And that did not seem like an appealing option for us.
So we said, look, if we're going to have an arena in order to have a sports team, can we at least work out a deal where taxpayers aren't being overly burdened for the next 30 years of cost, which is actually the deal we had with the Saddledome.
We weren't getting any payments from the Flames organization for their use of that facility.
Now we are.
Is the deal perfect?
No, I don't think it is.
And we have strong objections over how little consultation time there was for Calgarians to provide their feedback and their opinion to their city councilors.
They really rushed this through quickly.
But if the argument was going to be, do we want to make sure the flames stay in Calgary and we have an arena that's going to support that?
And can we work out a deal that doesn't put taxpayers on the hook for hundreds of millions of dollars year after year after year?
It seems to us that this deal was pretty reasonable.
Now, how does this deal compare to what Edmonton got?
Do you know that?
I mean, I can't tell you the specifics of the Evanson deal, although I was an Eventonian at the time it was being discussed.
What I can say is that it looks like Calgarians are getting a bit of a better deal for their arena.
We're not putting in as much money as Evanson ended up putting in across the whole range of things that Evonton actually invested in, which included things like extending an LRT system linkage to it and a few things like that.
So I think it's a pretty reasonable see.
We, of course, fully understand why some people are concerned about it and why they're questioning is this a good use of the money.
Certainly, in our opinion, Calgary has tremendous fiscal problems, and we've made it clear that we think we need structural reform.
We thought maybe there were other places to try and figure out better financing and better options than this arena.
We thought actually that the negotiation was pretty reasonable.
But at the same time, why aren't we having a good hard look at city spending?
We know that one out of three city employees earns over $100,000 a year, that the average cost to the city for one of its employees is over $115,000 a year when you consider pension and benefits and all of those other things.
We haven't taken any real action to cut those costs.
So for us, rather than not having an arena, maybe losing the flames, losing having a major concert venue for us in the heart of our Scampeak country, our Scampee grounds, wouldn't it be better to take a lot, you know, whack at trying to fix the out-of-control spending and out-of-control salaries down at City Hall?
You know what?
That's a great trade-off, isn't it?
Now, you pointed out something that makes a great segue into my next thing that I wanted to talk to you about.
Edmonton had to put out money for an LRT as part of their arena deal.
Calgary's got a serious problem with their LRT system and the cost of the green line.
It's turned into a $5 billion debacle, and there seems to be no end in sight.
What is going on there?
No, Sheila, you're absolutely right.
I mean, I think, you know, my family lives in Edmonton, and I've talked to them about all of the challenges Edmonton has faced with its LRT system from a signaling system that never fully worked to trains having to run so slowly that it's actually faster to take the buses on the same route than it is to take the trains.
So to me, those are not good signs.
But Calgary is well on its way to beating Edmonton into making worse LRT decisions.
We've been planning this green line for years, years and years and years.
It's designed to create a new LRT line that goes from the deep, deep south of Calgary to the far, far north, connecting all of those new communities with transit.
But in the space of just a few years, the wheels really have come off this project.
First of all, the head of the project quit and quit quite suddenly.
And the city really doesn't disclose why that is, but they're gone.
And then, you know, a few short months later, the deputy head of the project quit and said, look, you know, again, we don't know why, but just simply said, no, I'm not going to be involved anymore.
You've seen senior Calgary business people come out and say that the plan, the plan that we were following and we're going to start putting under construction in just a few months, up until very, very recently, that said this plan is totally unfeasible, that you cannot complete the project as is being envisioned.
One of the things they wanted to do was build a super deep tunnel through the downtown core and then under the Bow River.
And when we say super deep, you know, at least seven stories underground deep, you know, sort of core of the earth deep for this tunnel and then have it go under a river until, you know, and this was the official plan.
And all the city council, you know, nodded their heads and said, absolutely, this is, you know, we want to get it right the first time.
Have there bridges?
Sorry to interrupt, but there's six full bridges.
Well, you know, indeed.
And what is the cost of that tunnel?
Well, the cost of the tunnel meant that instead of being this long, the green line was going to end up being that long, but still cost the same amount of money.
So it was going to be $5 billion to build the green line from here to here.
It was going to be $5 billion to build the green line from here to here, but with this tunnel underneath it.
And then they simply said, Look, we've looked at it.
We cannot build this tunnel.
There's too much stuff already happening underneath of downtown Calgary, you know, sewer lines and power lines and parkades and structural engineering and all of this stuff.
We can't build the tunnel.
And to me, the question is, well, wait, because Safe Calgary has waved the flag a couple times saying we have some issues with this green line.
And city council wrote back and said, no, no, we've done our homework.
This is the right way.
This tunnel will ensure that this project is, you know, meets the needs.
And finally, it took getting to the eve of construction before city council said, wait, maybe this technically impossible tunnel that's going to cost $5 billion to the LRC isn't something we can actually achieve as a city.
So I don't know where they're going to go with this.
They've now paused to have a conversation about the green line.
And to us, it's like, why wasn't this conversation held years ago when this ridiculous plan was first put forward?
It seems to me the only success of the green line so far is its ability to allow politicians to re-announce funding to it.
How many times have we seen politicians, all the way back to Stephen Harper, keep reannouncing how they're supporting the green line and they're throwing more money at the green line?
That actually seems to be the only thing that has been a successful aspect of this whole project.
Why Wasn't the Conversation Held Sooner?00:08:15
You know, you're right.
I mean, I've seen a half a dozen at least government announcements about money.
It really is.
The only thing about the green line that seems to be there is the green.
The governments have announced they're putting into taxpayer dollars into this project without a single piece of track being laid down anywhere along the route.
So um, you know, in it and other cities Edmonton is just one, but other cities have major problems with their LRT construction.
Ottawa has built, you know, has been building an LRT.
It built a tunnel through heading into its downtown and the tunnel caved in over and over and over again and then, of course, when they were, you know, finally getting to the point of putting trains on it well, turns out, the trains they had chosen don't work so well in either the snow or the cold both things, by the way, that you find in an Ottawa winter.
So those train cars, by the way, made by Canadian engineering firm SNC Lablin, isn't that interesting.
Yeah, it seems like the only green in this line is coming right out of taxpayers pockets.
Um, now another thing in Calgary I want to touch on.
Rick Bell had a great column on it in the Calgary SUN and it's about the horror show.
Those are his words, not mine, although I'd probably use them also with regard to the Beltline supervised injection or supervised consumption site.
He has the statistics for the police calls to the area.
They're up 452 percent, while the rest of the city is up nine percent.
Um, and which is?
I I suppose that's counterintuitive to uh.
The reason these harm reduction activists say we need to have these supervised injection sites all over the place is because it will reduce the amount of police calls and take pressure off police resources if we have these places where people can inject their illegal drugs safely.
It's a tremendous problem.
I mean, Rick Bell lives in Beltline and, you know, our little safe Calgary crew work out of Beltline.
In fact, only about a block and a half from the safe injection site.
You know, it's so interesting.
It's hard to have a real conversation about this problem.
I mean, first of all, it's hard to even get consensus that there is a problem, but there really is.
Anybody who owns a business or who has a home or parks a car in this region knows that there's a problem because they've seen their cars being broken into by addicts looking for things they can steal and then pawn or trade.
We've seen people who are passed out in the streets, in alleys, from overconsuming.
The area has become littered with syringes, used syringes.
And all that people that the advocates of the safe injection sites are coming back with is the argument about harm reduction.
Well, I don't think that's good enough.
When we come to think about drug addicts, simply allowing someone to continue living a miserable drug-addled existence, but for many more years than they might otherwise isn't good enough.
In fact, in my opinion, it's morally just wrong.
We need to be talking about how we're going to help these people get better.
We need to be talking about treatment.
We need to be talking about the rights of property owners and families who live here.
Calgary has invested significant dollars into beltline revitalization.
We've been trying to make this community a place where young working professionals want to, you know, want to live and work and spend their leisure dollars on going into attractions.
But if you fill the area with people with crime and with people who are addicted to drugs and just dropping syringes, you're underdoing all that hard work that the community and the city did to try and make this a better community.
So for us, our answer is look at some of the jurisdictions who have grappled with this problem.
And then also look at some of the jurisdictions who have ignored this problem and not done anything to fix it.
And I'm thinking, for example, of Seattle, which has such a tremendous problem on their hands right now.
The police have basically just given up on trying to do any form of community safety enforcement in those zones.
I mean, we don't even have to look that far.
We just have to look at Vancouver.
And actually, I misspoke there from Rick Bell's article.
It's actually even worse.
I said that police calls are up 452% while they're only up 9% in the rest of the city.
It's actually that they're down 9% in the rest of the city.
So it's actually even worse.
But going back to my point about Vancouver, Vancouver, what has it been?
Two decades that they've had these supervised consumption sites.
They promised us that people would that this would be a pathway to treatment somehow, that this constant contact with healthcare proficials, healthcare professionals would be a pathway to treatment, but that's not the case.
They said that it would reduce the amount of property crime if we're giving people drugs and needles.
Well, that also is not the case.
And that's clearly not the case playing out in Calgary.
We have a lot of evidence that this doesn't work for the addict and for the community it's placed in and for the taxpayers of the city as a whole.
And yet, still we have these people who claim to be advocates for the drug addicted and advocates for these inner city poverty stricken communities continuing to advocate for this, I guess it's corralling of drug addicts in certain neighborhoods.
And people will say stuff like, oh, you know, the opioid crisis, the opioid crisis.
Well, I think statistics are playing out that the opioid crisis is affecting all demographics.
It's affecting people in suburbia and affluent neighborhoods.
Affluent families are being hit by this and rural communities are being hit by this.
So what good does it do to hold people up in low-income communities and concentrate the violence and the property crime there when this is a society-wide problem?
No, I think you're absolutely right, Sheila.
And to be honest, for the advocates who say safe injection sites solve the problems, I mean, I don't think they spend enough time talking to people who actually live and work in these communities.
Because when you see crime spike, when you see cars being broken into and windows and homes being broken into and drug addicts leaving syringes everywhere, all you're doing is actually eroding community support to try and meaningfully fix this problem.
Eventually, it just turns into, we want it out of here.
Just move it somewhere else.
NIMBYism, right?
Well, no, because the problem with that is it just moves the problem to another location.
Whereas we need to really think about how we're going to solve it.
And simply prolonging suffering, which is what I think a lot of these safe injection sites do, isn't enough.
It's not enough to just condemn people to these lives.
We have to be real about it.
And that, I think, means a combination of more treatment options, a combination of better police enforcement, and having a zero tolerance policy for people who commit property and other crimes of that nature.
And I think it means, you know, taking a hard look about what are we doing to cut off the supply of illegal drugs into our cities.
Right now, drug dealers set up shop a block away from the safe injection site.
And to me, how on earth can that be helping addicts when you're allowing the people who make money off this evil to be setting up shop right down the street?
Well, especially when, you know, it seems to be a black hole around these communities of policing.
Police just, like you say, they throw up their hands and say, look, it's too much.
It's just, it's too much, the property crime.
And so the drug dealers know that.
There need to be stiffer penalties for people who are peddling these poisons in our communities.
Justin Trudeau's Sanctions Concern00:07:06
But this is a topic I could literally talk about all day.
But I wanted to move to the federal election.
You are, you know, you're at Safe Calgary and you're, you know, very adept in Alberta provincial politics, but you are also a wise, wise man when it comes to federal politics.
And that's one of the reasons I wanted to have you on the show.
Justin Trudeau was just found guilty of another ethics violation in the SNC Lavillin scandal.
And it is, you know, we've got a real problem here when the ethics commissioner is numbering the Trudeau ethics reports.
That's unusual with regard to a prime minister.
We certainly didn't see that sort of thing with Stephen Harper now, did we?
No.
In fact, Justin Trudeau broke ground.
He made history when he became the first prime minister to break, sitting prime minister to break conflict of interest rules.
And he's just made history again by being the only prime minister to break those same rules twice in his same mandate in office.
And you're right.
The ethics commissioner has to label which Trudeau ethics report this is because, again, there's been more than one.
And, you know, the arguments coming from Mr. Trudeau and his team are that they've never done anything wrong.
And not just on this issue, they've never done anything wrong ever in their time in office.
It's only us poor folk who aren't clever enough to understand what they're trying to do and what the, you know, what the, if we were just a little bit more sophisticated, we would be able to see that the great good of this prime minister and his team outweighs all petty considerations like breaking rules and violating the law.
So, I mean, I hope that Canadians do take a really good, hard look at the fact that this is a prime minister who's been sanctioned several times for breaking laws.
This is a prime minister who claims to be a feminist, but then drummed two of his most senior women ministers out of office for raising, as it turns out, entirely legitimate concerns about his actions on this file.
This is a prime minister who claims that First Nations reconciliation is his top priority.
And yet, when the justice minister, the first First Nations justice minister, raised concerns about his interference in an impartial investigation and prosecution of a corporate villain, he totally overruled her and then shoved her to the side and has now even suggested, well, she just never was on our side.
She really wasn't one of us.
So to me, I hope voters really do take a good hard look at this prime minister.
You know, the federal conservatives under Andrew Scheer have been running this campaign saying not as advertised of Justin Trudeau.
And I think that's really spot on.
He's not a feminist.
He's not a consultative leader.
He's not a champion for First Nations people.
He is a preening bully who, if he doesn't get his own way, will throw everybody else under the bus.
And he's not sorry because in his mind, he couldn't possibly ever do anything wrong.
You know, it's funny, the conservative election ads, or rather the attack ads from the last election cycle, they really eventually turn out to be like a crystal ball.
When they said that Ignatia, if he didn't come back for us, and then right after the election, Ignatia left, when they said Justin Trudeau just wasn't ready.
Yeah, still four years later, he's just not ready.
It's funny how people thought those election attack ads were silly and sort of childish, but they turned out to be a glimpse into the future.
And a lot of people probably should have listened.
Do you think this elections violation or sorry, this ethics violation finding is going to affect votes?
Do you think people who are committed Trudeau voters care?
That's really the question here.
You know, it's tricky, right?
Because I mean, I think for some people, they will love Justin Trudeau regardless of what he says or does.
You know, for them, this isn't a question of leadership.
Their devotion to him is fanatical.
So, no, I mean, I think that this, in that case, if you're one of those people, then no, I don't think this ethics report is going to make a difference.
If you're an everyday voter, typical voter living in, say, suburban Toronto, what I'm really hoping is you're going to have a think and say to myself, is this really a leader, a prime minister who understands the difficulties, the challenges me and my family have?
This prime minister, this millionaire prime minister born into a trust fund into an elite family of celebrities and business and the political elite, does he really understand what it's like to try and pay the mortgage bill or to try and pay the power bill or to try and afford to send your kids to hockey practice?
And the answer I think I hope that Canadians are going to come up with is no.
In fact, this prime minister has absolutely no idea what it's like to try and struggle and make ends meet.
He took a vacation on a billionaire private island from his friend the Aga Khan, someone who lobbies the government.
And so that was, by the way, why he was found guilty the first time of an ethics violation.
But no, that's not an everyday experience for Canadians.
So to me, I'm hoping what this latest thing does is help create more of the picture of who Justin Trudeau really is.
And when his government tries to say he's on the side of middle-class Canadians, I really hope that the facts point to a very different story in the minds of voters.
I mean, it'll be hard to say.
We know what's coming.
We know that Justin Trudeau will accuse his opponents, Andrew Scheer and the Conservatives, of everything under the sun, of being misogynists, of being bigots, of being racist and homophobes, and of supporting white supremacy.
You know, ad nauseum claims of hatred that simply aren't borne out by the facts.
So to me, I'm hoping that anybody who pays the slightest bit of attention knows that those liberal attacks are nothing but lies and smear, and that when Justin Trudeau talks about being on your side, he can't because he's really not on your side.
Yeah, I think back to a couple weeks ago when Justin Trudeau tweeted out about how he understands how hard it is to save for your first home.
And he touted this liberal, you know, plan to help with your down payment.
And it's like, excuse me, didn't you get gifted a mansion that's now a Canadian Heritage Site once your dad passed away?
Like, he thinks that we don't know his history, that we're just incapable of plugging into a Google search, you know, what did Justin Trudeau inherit?
The Coming Election Tone00:04:25
But I do think you're right about the tenor and tone of the coming election.
I think it is going to be really tough on conservatives.
And I don't mean conservative MPs and conservative candidates.
I think generally conservative voters are in for a tough go of it.
This next little bit, they're going to be called all manner of names, malicious, libelous names, things they aren't.
I can only hope that after putting up with those same names for the last four years, that our hides are a little thicker and we don't take it personally.
We just shrug it off and vote the way our hearts and minds compel us to.
I want to give you a chance to let everybody know where they can find the great work that you do at Save Calgary and how they can support you in your efforts to hold city council accountable and to force a little bit of transparency down there.
Oh, well, thank you so much, Sheila.
I, you know, we are the little engine that could of municipal watchdog groups.
We, you know, we started off because there just wasn't anybody else really trying to hold city council to account.
And I think as a whole, conservatives sometimes ignore municipal politics and it's to their own detriment that they do because so many bad decisions can get made at the municipal level.
And then, you know, those people go on to become MPs and MPPs and MLAs and bring their bad government with them.
So Save Calgary.
Adam Vaughn.
Adam Vaughn, who I had really never heard of until yesterday when I discovered he apparently is a complete raving lunatic.
So that's an exciting, exciting development in my book.
So for Save Calgary, there's a couple things you can do to help us out.
That would be great.
The first is please sign up to our weekly email list.
We put out a weekly email.
Even right now, when City Council is on summer vacation, we're still putting out our weekly update emails.
And you can go to savecalgary.com and sign up there to keep on top of what our issues are.
If you have the means, increasingly difficult under this municipal and under this federal government, but if you have some extra money, we would very much appreciate a donation to keep going.
We don't receive taxpayer money unlike so many other groups do, and we never will based on our highly critical position of municipal government.
But we think it's an important message and that the voice is important to be heard.
And the third thing is, you know, give us a follow on our social media.
We're both on Facebook and on Twitter.
You know, facebook.com slash savecalgary, twitter.com slash save Calgary.
And we're on there pretty actively.
And if you have any leads for us on these things, you know, we have some great, great supporters who tip us off about some of the things happening in and around the city.
So those are three things you could do that would be really helpful to us as an organization.
And certainly think about that next municipal election coming up in 2021.
It's happening sooner than we think.
There's a real opportunity to make some change if we can get ourselves organized and if we can lay the groundwork right now to make Calgarians vote for change.
Yeah, the process to identify candidates and get them some name recognition in advance of the election starts now.
It starts immediately.
If Calgarians are tired of Lord Nenshi, now's the time to put some money where their mouth is and maybe throw a little support behind Save Calgary.
And I got to tell you, those emails that you send out are pretty well written.
And I get a lot of emails from a lot of political groups and advocacy groups in the course of a day.
And I got to tell you, Save Calgary is probably the only ones that I open.
Well, we appreciate that, Sheila.
I'll tell the team you said so.
Okay, great.
William, I want to thank you so much for coming on the show and being so generous with your time.
And we'll check back in periodically.
And of course, as the federal election approaches, because even the federal election affects municipal politics and we're going to see a lot of funding dumped Calgary's way to try to save some liberal seats in that city, I think.
I think you could well be right on that.
I'd be interested to know if they're going to be able to announce their support another time for the green light before election day.
Here's hoping.
William On Save Calgary00:00:52
William, thanks so much for coming on the show.
Thanks, Sheila.
Appreciate it.
Agree or disagree with William on the arena deal?
There's beauty in the fact that conservatives can hold different opinions and not be excommunicated from the conservative fold.
You see, instead of acting like a bunch of liberals and marching in ideological lockstep with each other while also simultaneously proclaiming that diversity is our strength, conservatives can actually engage in debate and discussion and reasoned, rational arguments with each other.
Fancy that.
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 weekend.