Council declares Green Line dead, but Danielle Smith thinks her study can revive it

At one point in this week's council debate about the life and death of the Green Line, Coun. Terry Wong tried comparing its currently perilous position to one battle in a long war. However, the conservative-leaning councillor seemed to quickly regret casting the UCP government as the city's enemy.

"I don't think I'd just declared the war is over, this project is over, especially when the opponent — if we can call the province an opponent — is prepared to come back and continue the conversation, continue this battle," Wong said.

Many other councillors may have been frustrated enough with the province's abrupt rejection of the city's southeast LRT alignment this month to consider the Smith government its adversary. And a clear majority have waved the white flag, declaring the $6.2-billion project dead because of the province's withdrawal of financial support. 

"I don't know why they did this, but withdrawing the funding killed the project," Gondek told council. "There is no more Green Line as we've known it."

Thanks to inflation and delays, what the city had pitched for years as a 13-station first phase to around 126th Avenue S.E. became a seven-station venture to Lynnwood/Millican, around 60th Avenue. Transportation Minister Devin Dreeshen, despite essentially backing the plan in a July 29 letter to the city, declared it dead five weeks later as far as the Alberta government was concerned.

Will these Green Line construction sites eventually see an LRT?

2 months ago

Duration 4:24

As the city and province decide if the LRT project has a future, the CBC's Helen Pike caught up with Calgarians near the project construction sites that now sit in limbo.

Amid some colleagues' attempts to merely pause the project until December while Premier Danielle Smith's side conducts a study on an alternative route with more stations and no downtown tunnel, leaders of the Green Line project said they couldn't go forth, with no idea what to tell designers and suppliers about what the line was going to look like in the meantime.

The mayor said there was nothing to pause, nothing to carry on with during this four-month limbo — and, perhaps, potentially nothing to even reuse of the various construction sites or real-estate acquisitions or its order of dozens of low-floor train cars.

"The many meetings that administration and I have had with the province tells us they wish for no tunnels and they are not interested at this time in looking at salvaging anything," Gondek said.

As part of this surrender, the city considers $1.3 billion in already sunk costs to now be marooned at sea, or to switch from a water analogy to Coun. Gian-Carlo Carra's terms, "lit on fire." On top of that, is what city officials project as "at least" $850 million to wind down and tie up loose ends — that is, stuff like ongoing construction projects and all those supply contracts and worker salaries with their varied severance provisions.

The city hints at potential litigation to come, and an expectation that the project's federal and provincial funding partners help wind down this project. Dreeshen, whose provincial missive triggered this reaction, said his government won't financially help with the death of a project it still wants to help build. 

The premier has chosen to overlook Calgary council's 10-5 vote to wind down the Green Line project as it has long existed, and instead declares that the true will of the city's representatives lies in its 8-7 vote to continue discussing some sort of LRT project with the provincial government.

Provincial ministers have preferred to cast their frustrations on decade-old history, the origins of the project as a $4.5-billion line that spanned between the far north and southeast ends of Calgary, back when current NDP Leader Naheed Nenshi was mayor, and Smith's premier predecessor Jason Kenney was a federal minister seeking Conservative re-election in 2015.

That soon proved to be a fictional figure, as it assumed a train could cross the Bow River over the century-old Centre Street Bridge (it can't, officials determined) and that the city would traverse downtown more cheaply than by tunnelling (it couldn't, officials determined after considering alternative ideas). 

How much would Calgary spend to wind down the Green Line LRT?

2 months ago

Duration 1:42

With the provincial government pulling its funding from the Green Line LRT earlier this month, City of Calgary officials say they have no choice but to wind down the project. Early estimates of the minimum costs involved put the city's total spending at over $2 billion.

But Smith has rejected the decisions that city planners provided, and that then-Premier Kenney ultimately endorsed in 2021. She reasons that the downtown tunnel makes the current project far too costly, at around $620 million per kilometre. "If it continues to be built out at that rate, it will be a $20 billion project," Smith told reporters.

If the city had built out its first phase to Shepard as previously planned, it would have been 20 kilometres for $7.2 billion — a relatively more palatable $360 million per kilometre. But the city couldn't cough up the extra $1 billion, and the province refused to, so the Green Line board decided to hack off its southern stations and preserve the downtown section, the heart of a future north-south Green Line.

Smith and the UCP, however, consider the longer southeast part as the section that can't be economized or compromised. They'll provide a lower-budget downtown section in favour of reaching as many suburban commuters as possible.

"We've got to have at least one part of the line built as it was originally pitched to us," Smith told reporters Wednesday.

This is emerging as a key question in this dispute. Is the heart of a train line the number of neighbourhoods it serves, or is it the key destination? Gondek and council want a train that serves the middle of an already congested and constantly humming downtown, as a start with hopes of extending it further later on to reach more residents; Smith and cabinet want more stations, and it's fine if it delivers passengers to the east edge of downtown or the Flames arena (which hosts events fewer than half the days in a year). 

In other words, is the most important part of transit serving where people live, or where they work?

The city's revised plan in July, to serve fewer Calgarians, wasn't palatable to many residents, or councillors, or certainly provincial government politicians. But is devoting more than $2 billion — one-third of the project's total costs — to its demise any better? Is resting all hopes on a few months of study better?

The firm contracted by the province to provide that study, AECOM, is an engineering agency which happened to be the bid group that was runner-up to lead the development of the Green Line project, including the downtown tunnel portion.

Meanwhile, the premier isn't only reconsidering the way a Green Line LRT gets downtown. She's also mused about completely reimagining how it extends to north-central Calgary — questioning if it should be connected to the southeast leg at all, or whether it couldn't just cut through the Deerfoot Trail/Nose Creek valley, largely bypassing the many communities along Centre Street. Both hearken back to debates city transit planners had settled a decade or so ago.

Any success that Smith's Green Line revision has will rest on support from funders in Ottawa and at Calgary city hall, where many convey their trust in the province's goodwill and reliability on this is shattered.

And should an above-ground LRT route to downtown work for all parties, how much of the $2.1 billion said to be aflame can be doused and restored?

If we can revert to war analogies one more time, the Green Line appears to be stuck in more of a quagmire than a détente. Idealists may dream of peace or total victory, but realists will see something different.