Warning: Occupancy of This Austin Mini by More Than 53 Candidates for City Council Is Strictly Forbidden

With the winding of August along its inexorable and increasingly frigid way towards its end comes the inevitable arrival of a Calgary autumn and of the municipal silly season. That’s right, folks—Calgary’s civic election is back on the radar, coming to a school gymnasium or community hall near you a mere seven weeks from now, on 15 October. Once again, the good citizens of this city are poised to consider the many local issues affecting them in their day-to-day lives and make the sober yet necessary decisions about who will represent their interests in City Council chambers and from the mayoral dais that will ensure the effective and responsible governance of their fair city for the next three years.

Or not.

There’s something about municipal elections in Calgary that draws to the flickering flame of the candle of local democracy the usual eclectic assortment of kooks, wackos, losers, wanna-bes, never-weres, and lifers every third autumn. Would that the city’s voters came out of the woodwork in the same profusion—if the results from the 2004 election are to be trusted, over 80 percent of Calgary electors apparently decided they would find more fulfilment in giving the polls a miss and ranting about the failures of their civic polity on some talk radio show instead. From my standpoint, any government, but especially one so close to the little tangibles such as transportation and tap water that we as citizens take for granted as City Council, operates on the simple principles of RIRO (that is, rubbish in, rubbish out) and use it or lose it.

That’s why I’m willing to do my teensy wee little part to help take back City Council in October.

The Beltline is a part of Ward Eight in Calgary City Council, and although it will still be about three weeks before all the candidates’ nominations are confirmed and posted at City Hall, at this stage the most informed speculation—or at least, as informed a speculation as we currently have—suggests that my selection of candidates will include the following choices:

• Steve Chapman—one of two ex-cops considering a run for Ward Eight, and the one with an executive affiliation with Calgary’s favourite platoon of reactionary loons, the Progressive Group for Independent Business;
• Madeleine King—the defending cham-peen, ladeeeez and gentlemen; a barrister, urban planning student, and Elboya society maven who occasionally returns telephone calls and occasionally pops into the Beltline to tell the gathered inkslingers how shocked and appalled she is that there are criminal elements in the neighbourhood;
• Lindsay Luhnau—a bright-eyed, bushy-tailed environmental advocate of 26 whose platform combines earnestness, an abiding affection for Mother Earth, and a policy on plastic shopping bags that proves, folks, that she has never lived in a conapt with a cat;
• John Mar—the other of two ex-cops considering a run for Ward Eight, and the one with his sanity intact; as president of the Scarboro Community Association, he let it be known to City Hall that relocating a halfway house to within Rocko-walking distance of a community park and an elementary school might not be the best conceivable idea; and
• Teddy Paraskevopoulos—some guy, apparently, of whom little, including his actual intention to run for City Council, is in point of fact known.

Now given that life in the Beltline has given me some ideas about mass transit, public safety, open communication, and quality of life that I would consider to be in my interest to have addressed on my terms, as opposed to terms set by some seat warmer with an ideological hobby horse and a chip on the shoulder, I came up with a few questions that I will pose—right here, folks, and right now—to all of the candidates for the Ward Eight seat on City Council:

Focus on Community:

F1. Please describe how the most important lesson you learnt in working with your community league is relevant to your work as an alderman.

F2. Please recount a situation wherein you were able to respond constructively to a commercial development proposal for your community that in your estimation was poorly conceived.

Responsiveness:

R1. Please identify the criteria you would use to differentiate between correspondence you would delegate to your constituency assistant and correspondence to which you would respond personally.

R2. Please summarise how you would follow up a query from a constituent who previously called 311 to report a case of vandalism and who has now contacted you to ask why the vandalism has not been remediated.

Addressing Concerns:

A1. Please indicate how you would respond to a constituent's concern that the employees of a city department on whose services the constituent depends for day-to-day living are contemplating a labour disruption that would bring these services to a halt.

A2. Please articulate your position on how you would improve the connection of the western communities of the Beltline (that is, between 4 Street SW and 14 Street SW) to the CTrain system and to other modes of transportation across the CP Rail right of way into the downtown core.

Credibility:

C1. Please explain, in light of Calgary's recent land annexation, how you would reconcile the need to provide civic infrastructure to new communities on the city periphery with the need to maintain and enhance the social, environmental, and structural conditions of such inner-city communities as the Beltline.

C2. Please clarify where you stand on how Calgary's growth in population and international awareness over the past ten years affects its standing and its mandate for action on behalf of its citizenry relative to those of the provincial and federal governments.

Tiebreaker Questions, to be scored individually if needed:

T1. Please compare the relative merits of the existing strategy for planning and building the north-centre line of the CTrain system to those of constructing an underground LRT line beneath Centre Street.

T2. Please suggest a workable public safety strategy for residents of the city centre who have expressed concerns about openly illegal activities on commercial sites immediately adjoining critical locations within the public realm.

A note to all of the candidates, declared and potential alike—these questions are also available for transmittal in an MS Excel workbook that also includes a description of the scoring system; just post a comment with your e-mail address for further details. Please note that especially insightful, vapid, or uproarious responses will more likely than not be posted here for the edification and amusement of my reading public. (Thanks—both of you.)

Personally, I can’t wait to see what the candidates have to say. Let the 2007 silly season commence!

Fort Macleod: All Existing Things Soon Change

Time is like a river made up of the events that happen, and a violent stream; for as soon as a thing has been seen, it is carried away, and another comes in its place, and this will be carried away, too.

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, IV:43

After spending the Heritage Day long weekend with the wife and cat visiting Fort Macleod, a town of about 3,100 just over a hundred miles south-by-southeast of Calgary, I came away with a souvenir tee-shirt, an overwhelming desire for a real holiday, and a sense of sorrow for the pale shadow of its lost ambitions that is Fort Macleod today.

It all seemed to start with such promise. Colonel James Macleod came to the chinook-swept grassland at a bend in the Oldman River with a battalion from the Northwest Mounted Police in 1874, though perhaps it was telling that the townsite bearing his name would take shape ten years later two miles upstream because of the fort’s original island location’s vulnerability to floods. For the next thirty years, the emerging crossroads drew a staggering variety of dreamers, schemers, and the occasional shattered femur in conjunction with the Canadian Pacific and the Calgary and Edmonton Railways, and in a wild fit of starry-eyed optimism, the town fathers dropped the “Fort” from the Town of Macleod on the grounds that it would be unworthy of a ten-line railway nexus rivalling not only Lethbridge, thirty miles due east, but Calgary itself in size and economic importance.

The railways jilted Fort Macleod at the altar, naturally, decamping to Lethbridge and to Calgary as they consolidated their operations elsewhere in 1912. The outbreak of the First World War in 1914 would further drive away both labour and capital, leaving Fort Macleod sufficiently overextended and beggared ten years later that the Alberta provincial government would force the town to accept a low-interest consolidation loan that forbade the issue of municipal debt for capital spending for the next fifty years. What could not be petrified in amber was consequently left to rot.

Perhaps I was expecting more of Historic Main Street to remain standing in its faded brick and sandstone grandeur before we went to Fort Macleod, but what I saw of the district transcended mere disappointment. The frontier architecture of Main Street is confined to one city block, and even that truncated stretch consists of patches of anachronistic vinyl siding filling in the gaps between the commercial blocks of a century long passed. The rest of Main Street is lost but to memory and to silver tincture, buried in a morass of tarmac, cinderblocks, clapboard motels, and thistles and crabgrass elbowing themselves out of the cracks in parking lot pavement.

There was much wringing of hands in last Sunday’s edition of The Fishwrap about the tenebrous state of Fort Macleod’s heritage architecture, although some lovingly maintained gems still exist in the form of the 1912-vintage Empress Theatre and the century-old Reach Block. But the defining metaphor of Fort Macleod’s history is not so much the reconstructed wooden palisades of the Police Museum as it is the empty, boarded-up brickwork shell of the four-storey American Hotel at the west end of Main Street, abandoned to nature and to the limpet-like motel buttressing its eastern wall. And indeed, the future of Fort Macleod may not be so much the Alberta Police Academy, slated to open in 2010 in homage to Fort Macleod’s policing roots, as it is the reconstruction of Highway 2 and Highway 3 on the town’s southern outskirts—an uncomfortable and none-too-subtle reminder to Fort Macleod of the world passing it by.

Blot on the Beltline, Part 1

It’s an exciting time to be living in the Beltline right now. It seems like every time you turn about, there’s a new condominium tower being built, and the idea of so many people wanting to live, work, and play at the centre of this burgeoning city just warms the cockles of my heart. With the wide variety of public spaces and entertainment places a short walk away, it’s enough to give someone high hopes for the future of this town.

Which is why this place right here, the Stupor Drug Mart on the corner of 14 Street and 12 Avenue SW, drives me absolutely nucking futs:

I stood up and cheered when the riffraffatorium that called itself the 12 Avenue Bar and Grill was drummed out of the southwest corner of this eyesore back in March. With that being said, however, I can’t pass by this place without wondering when the rest of the building is going to come down. I’m sure it served its purpose back in the Sixties, when it first opened with a groceteria and a TD Bank branch, but the years have been kind neither to the building, uncomfortably straddling the boundary between the Beltline and Sunalta as a monument to entropy and decay, nor to the clientèle, left to pick through the second-hand Safeway’s labels and the low-grade dollar shop tchotchkes. Indeed, I doubt that even a New West answer to Ed Mirvish would be able to salvage the place--that would take people who actually cared a wet slap for their customers, and especially in this inflationary town, that sort of employee tends to steer a wide berth past the Stupor Drug Mart.

You know what I’d like to do, folks? I’d like to climb up on the roof of that place and paint a nice big fluorescent bullseye on the roof--you know, just to give the Klingons a sporting chance at hitting something, right? After all, there’s too much potential for something nicer, something more liveable, something less decrepit at that location for the Stupor Drug Mart to be suffered to live.

Cry Havoc!

And let slip the blogs of yore. Or something like that.

For those of you visiting my little corner of cyberspace in Calgary for the first time, welcome, and get back to work. Prepare to be underwhelmed by rants, raves, and rubbish about living in the Beltline and seeing the centre of Calgary sprouting condominium towers like so many toadstools; about the upcoming silly season; about the Bart Simpsons of professional football, the snakebitten effort to restore professional baseball to Calgary, and suchlike other diversions; and about whatever febrile attempts to channel the spirit of Bob Edwards may strike me.

If you're really lucky, you'll see the odd photograph. (If you're really unlucky, you'll see the odd scrap of poetry.)

Just try and remember that this place is a complete waste of time. Forewarned is forearmed. Now get back to work.