Calgary Green Line LRT in political crossfire, as Alberta minister blames NDP leader

CALGARY — Alberta’s government says it’s pulling $1.53 billion in funding from a massive Calgary Green Line light rail transit project already deep in sunk costs.

Premier Danielle Smith’s United Conservative government is blaming former mayor, NDP Leader Naheed Nenshi, for past mismanagement, while Calgary city council is pointing the finger at the province for taking back cash it’s already promised.

So far, Calgary has spent more than $1.4 billion on the Green Line LRT project, including $350 million in land acquisition, $400 million in utility work, and a new fleet of light rail vehicles, scheduled to begin arriving in late 2027.

After telling CBC radio earlier this month that city council can rest assured the provincial funding was secure, Alberta Transportation Minister Devin Dreeshen penned a letter to Gondek on Tuesday saying the government is “unable to support or provide funding” for the city’s most recent plan.

“The Green Line is fast becoming a multi-billion dollar boondoggle that will serve very few Calgarians,” Dreeshen wrote.

In the letter, Dreeshen acknowledges that hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent on Green Line work, but says “throwing good money after bad is simply not an option for our government.”

Dreeshen blames Nenshi, the mayor until 2021, for creating an “untenable situation.”

He writes that Nenshi failed to competently oversee the planning, design and implementation of a “cost-effective” plan for transit at the time.

Nenshi, in response, wrote in a statement Wednesday that the UCP government does not care about the needs of Calgarians, and called Tuesday’s decision a massive waste.

“The UCP government has chosen to make this a political issue. The UCP wants to make this about me. It’s not about me — it’s about doing the right thing for the tens of thousands of Calgarians that will be hurt by this decision,” said Nenshi.

“This is untenable and the people of Calgary deserve better than to be used as a political football,” said Nenshi.

The province now promises to contract a third party to come up with other costed proposals that would tweak how the Green Line is routed downtown, and extend it farther south.

Dreeshen, speaking to CBC radio on Wednesday, again accused Nenshi of failing to cost out and properly engineer the project from the beginning.

Dreeshen said he got new information from the city in mid-August about the project.

“The biggest issue with the city, or that we had with this, was the business plan to show that 40 per cent reduction in ridership for over $6 billion of a transit project — that would just be a bad project,” he said, pointing to his concerns about plans to tunnel under downtown.

Nenshi, in turn, has blamed the UCP government under successive leadership for delaying the project in the past, leading to added costs.

Meanwhile, vehicles the city has already bought won’t work under the new rail alignment Dreeshen now wants to see, Green Line Board Chair Don Fairbairn said at a city hall meeting that stretched late into Wednesday afternoon.

That’s one of many unexpected costs the city is still trying to grapple with.

When asked how the city plans and the province might come to a middle ground, Fairbairn was pessimistic.

“We don’t believe that we can recover from this,” he said.

The city has agreements made with contractors, landowners, and utilities that have already signed on the dotted line related to the project, Fairbairn said.

Calgary Mayor Jyoti Gondek said in light of the province pulling out, the city can no longer afford the project.

Late Wednesday afternoon, Calgary city council voted to ask administrators to figure out the costs of completely winding down the rail project that some have pined for for more than a decade.

They also voted to explore how the city might transfer the delivery and unknown costs of the Green Line, now that it’s in limbo, to the provincial government.

“This is now the province’s project. They need to be the ones to hold the risk on this,” Gondek said.

The mega-project’s budget has grown since it first secured funding from higher levels of government, and its route towards the south of the city has been progressively scaled back.

In 2015, it was set to be finished by 2024 at a cost of $4.5 billion.

This July, council voted to cut the length of the first phase of the line, and it’s now estimated to cost over $6.2 billion.

The federal government has committed to spending $1.53 billion on the Green Line.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 4, 2024.

The Canadian Press