Q & A: Mayor Jyoti Gondek reflects on a year in the hot seat

Mayors are always in the hot seat it seems. And 2024 delivered that for Calgary Mayor Jyoti Gondek. 

Whether it was council appearing to be disconnected from Calgarians, a recall campaign, or a wonky water pipe, 2024 was a year that kept the mayor and council on their toes.

Gondek sat down recently for a year-end interview with CBC Calgary's municipal affairs reporter Scott Dippel. Here is some of their conversation, edited for length and clarity.

CBC: What tops your list as the most important thing that council accomplished in 2024?

Jyoti Gondek: Listening to Calgarians and understanding what their top priorities are, we made some pretty wise investments.

We heard from Calgarians that public safety was top of mind for them. So we were able to deliver on having more uniformed transit officers available throughout the day. We made sure that we made strong investments into a downtown police station, and we have created a greater number of outreach teams that are able to respond to people in positions of crisis.

We also know that infrastructure is top of mind for Calgarians. We increased the amount of investment in our pavement quality and we've made sure that we have stronger and better monitoring and maintenance systems for our water infrastructure. And we are committed to ensuring that we've got strong recreation opportunities within our city.

We also know that affordability has been a serious issue for many Calgary families. So we have ensured that we still have the low-income transit pass and the fare entry program that allows for low-income passes for recreation as well.

As you well know, this has been a very turbulent year in municipal politics. Some controversies related to council decisions. I think back to that fee on paper bags at drive-thrus for example. Some things just happened, like the water feeder main break back in June. Other things have been more personal for you, like being the target of a failed recall campaign. What do you take away from an above-normal number of controversies?

JG: I think it's important to recognize where you didn't get it right. I mean, right off the top in January, the single-use bylaw, we did not get that right. It was a mistake. We did not communicate well to Calgarians. And the surprise that they had as they were trying to scramble from getting to school to activities for their kids and finding out that there's going to be a charge on bags? Not the right way to do it. So it's important to own when you've made a mistake.

At the same time, it's also important to celebrate the sense of community in this city.

When we asked Calgarians very politely, could you please reduce the amount of water you're using because there's no way to mandate it, Calgarians and people in the region responded right away. They found ways and tips and tricks to save water. They shared them with each other, and we really banded together when the chips were down.

And considering the world's eyes were on us for about four weeks, we demonstrated that we know how to stand together and do good things.

Calgary's mayor reflects on lessons learned after a tumultuous year

5 days ago

Duration 8:18

Mayor Jyoti Gondek sat down with CBC Calgary City Hall reporter Scott Dippel to talk about the challenges of the past year and what we can expect from council before next fall's civic election.

The province's relationship with Calgary and other municipalities seems pretty fraught these days. Your predecessors obviously had difficulties managing that relationship as well, but now it seems to be much more about provincial control. How do you navigate those waters without it simply being, "Yes, premier, whatever you want"?

JG: I think it's important for locally elected representatives to always represent the people who put them into office. That's why I'm not a big fan of political parties. We need good Calgarians running who will represent the needs of the people of this city.

But you can lobby, you can point things out, you can speak forcefully, but at the end of the day, you know that on many issues the province pushes down on municipalities, they can get their way. How do you walk that line?

JG: It's important to always be an advocate. It is important to always tell the other two orders of government what we need in our city.

I mean, there's always talk about getting along with the other orders of government. I'm happy to do that. But ultimately my job is to push them to do their job. So I need them to be contributing to our economy and to our infrastructure.

If you think about the fact that we're the economic engine of this country, not even just this province, there's a lot of income tax revenue that leaves our city and goes both into provincial and federal coffers. That money needs to come back here. That is hard-earned money that the people of Calgary provided to those two orders of government who are supposed to be sharing it with us. And I'm not seeing a lot of sharing happening right now. So I'm absolutely going to continue to keep pushing for our fair share.

Building new housing seems to have become very controversial here. And it doesn't matter whether it's upzoning, big developers wanting to build more housing or non-profits developing on land that the city is making available. Why is this so hard in the middle of what is being called a housing crisis?

JG: I would say there's sometimes members of council who start being populist. There is no way that we should have been entertaining not allowing an affordable housing project in one of our communities. It was city-owned land that was sold for this specific purpose. To turn around and then say that we shouldn't have this project makes absolutely no sense.

And to actually kill a development project [the proposed 1,100 housing units at Glenmore Landing] that was transit-oriented. It included private sector dollars and it was contemplating affordable housing. To kill that project makes absolutely no sense.

Members of council who voted against that sent a clear message. We don't want your investment in our city.

And we talk a good talk about affordable housing, but we really don't want to take the action.

So I can't tell you what runs through their minds when they're making decisions. But if you actually care about the future of this city and you actually want to see housing built around transit sites, then you need to make tough decisions.

So I hope people understand that we've still got a year of work to do and we've got housing that we need to deliver to the public. I hope others stop playing election-year politics.