Nenshi says Calgarians suspect the government backed out of the Green Line just to make him look bad, putting at risk the money already spent, plus windup costs
NDP Leader Naheed Nenshi has a Halloween gag in store for Premier Danielle Smith and the UCP.
“I’m going to sell a whole bunch of merchandise in time for Halloween with ‘Nenshi Nightmare’ on it,” says the former Calgary mayor. “We’re going to make a lot of money from this.”
The NDP has ordered thousands of Nenshi Nightmare T-shirts and coffee mugs. One says Smith’s worst nightmare is publicly funded health care and education.
Nenshi says Calgarians suspect the government backed out just to make him look bad, putting at risk the money already spent, plus windup costs.
He wonders whether the UCP might have acted more sensibly — or at all — if he hadn’t won the NDP leadership.
“Of course it was about me, but it has backfired very badly,” Nenshi said in interview.
“You’ll notice that Minister (Devin) Dreeshen doesn’t insult me anymore. He stopped using ‘Nenshi Nightmare’ because it’s really blown back on them.
“Calgarians have seen that they’re willing to light $2.1 billion on fire just to get an insult out at me when there’s not even an election for three years.”
UCP strategy is to kill Nenshi’s chances with Calgarians before he really gets rolling as Opposition leader. Social media and TV are awash with the kind of attack ads usually seen during red-hot election campaigns.
“If the province had been smart, they would have sucked it up and said to the city, ‘please minimize your burn rate.’
“In other words, spend as little as possible between now and December, but keep doing the work that we know is going to be needed anyway, and we will pay the $30 million a month that will keep all these contracts active to save the $850 million in penalties.
“But they didn’t say that. And so, people have already started laying folks off.
“I happened to be at a street fair in Airdrie and I had two completely separate people walk up to me, both from engineering firms that have contracts on the Green Line.
“They told me they’ve already started laying off their staff and redeploying their people to other projects in Ontario and in the U.S.
“It’s already happening. These people are world experts in their field. You can’t expect them to sit on their thumbs, and you can’t expect to rehire them, either.”
Nenshi says there’s nothing new about running the line from Seton and the South Health Campus to the new event centre. “That’s always been part of the plan.”
But if it doesn’t connect to downtown and the existing lines, he adds, the whole project could still fall apart.
Ottawa sent “a very strong signal from the minister, saying they’re not going to fund a project that doesn’t go downtown.
“So, the city is not going to fund an alignment that doesn’t go downtown. The feds are not going to fund an alignment that doesn’t go downtown.”
He says the province could be stuck building the Seton line at a cost of about $7 billion, but with no federal or city money, only their own $1.5 billion.
Nenshi concludes: “The way they played this, anyone who is affiliated with the provincial government running in the next (civic) election is going to lose.
“The anger toward the government for what they’ve done in Calgary is unbelievable.”
But he’ll save a Halloween T-shirt for Smith. If she buys it.
Don Braid’s column appears regularly in the Herald