Alberta’s recent decision to stop funding Calgary’s Green Line LRT project has met with criticism from the city, including from former Mayor Naheed Nenshi. But the province maintains that the revised council-approved plan is
costing billions over budget and serving too few Calgarians.
Alberta Transportation Minister Devin Dreeshen
wrote to Calgary Mayor Jyoti Gondek on Sept. 3 saying the provincial government can’t support the city’s latest plan. “For example, I note an approximate 40% reduction in the ridership while the total project cost has risen by about 14 percent,” he wrote, referring to a business case the city submitted to his department on Aug. 15 on phase one of the light-rail transit (LRT) project.
Gondek replied in a post on X the next day, saying, “We have been fiscally responsible with the Green Line. We have tried to deliver it within the budget we had before us with our other two funding partners.” “We can no longer be the order of government that’s holding the debt financing and all of the financial risk on this project,” she added.
The Green Line was described as the “highest public transit infrastructure priority” for the City of Calgary in a 2015 predesign and development planning
document on the line’s southeast leg. That July, the federal government had pledged one-third of the project costs, about
$1.53 billion, once a formal application has been received and approved.
At the time, the mega project was set to be finished by 2024 at a cost of around $4.6 billion. The City of Calgary had earlier in 2013 approved $52 million annually for the 10-year period from 2015 to 2024 for the project.
The Alberta government subsequently announced a
$1.54 billion funding commitment, in 2017, and the federal government
confirmed its commitment of $1.53 billion in 2018, indicating it was for “stage 1 of the Green Line LRT.”
Calgary’s
current LRT system consists of an east-west Blue Line and a Red Line extending from the northwest to the south. The
long-term vision for the Green Line, part of Calgary Transit’s 30-year plan, is to
connect more of Calgary’s northern and southern communities via a 46-kilometre expansion to that existing LRT system, adding 29 stations upon completion.
By 2020, the budget for phase one of the project had grown to over
$5.5 billion.
On July 30 this year, Calgary city council, citing rising costs, approved a
revised plan for phase one that would remove several stations from the original plan. The updated budget is now over $6.2 billion, up $705 million from the $5.5 billion approved in 2020.
The revised phase one will include the construction of seven stations along a 10-kilometre stretch, as detailed on the project’s
website, with some
eight remaining areas to be fulfilled at a later time. Ridership is now estimated at up to
32,000 daily users, compared to
55,000 projected under a previous plan that had included 13 stations across 18 kilometres.
Transfer to Province
In his Sept. 3 letter, Dreeshen told Gondek that the province has an obligation to “ensure taxpayer dollars for infrastructure are allocated efficiently and in a manner that will benefit the largest amount of Albertans possible.”
“The Green Line is fast becoming a multi-billion dollar boondoggle that will serve very few Calgarians,” he wrote.
Gondek
responded the next day on X, saying the city cannot afford the cost without the provincial funding. She said city administration will undertake “an orderly wind down of the Green Line project with associated costs” and transfer the project delivery and risk to the provincial government.
“This is not the outcome we wanted for this project, particularly for the people on Green Line team & Board who have invested so much into this much-needed piece of transit infrastructure,” she wrote on Sept. 4. “To say this was a difficult decision is an understatement.”
‘Uncertain as to What Changed Their Mind’
An earlier
letter from Dreeshen to Gondek, dated July 29, had confirmed that funding for phase one of the Green Line “will not be reduced or pro-rated” as long as two conditions related to scope were met.
Specifically, the letter said that phase one must connect to the existing Red and Blue lines in downtown Calgary and that it has to integrate into the province’s planned “Grand Central Station,” next to the arena and entertainment district.
The July 29 did not mention a need to review a business case or require an independent third-party review to provide alternative costed proposals, as indicated in the minister’s Sept. 3 letter.
In a July 30
news release, the city had said it has spent over $1.4 billion to date on the project, including $350 million in land acquisition, $400 million in works such as utility upgrades nearing completion, and a new fleet of low-floor light rail vehicles scheduled to begin arriving in late 2027.
“I’m uncertain as to what changed their mind,” Gondek
said during a Sept. 5
interview on CBC’s Calgary Eyeopener, referring to the provincial government.
“I’m not certain what happened when they received the business case on Aug. 15. The business case contained the same information that we had provided early and often in July, and it is the same information that we used to make our decision as council on the 30th of July,” she said.
‘Political Issue’
On Aug. 1, two days after city council approved the revised project scope for phase one of the Green Line, Dreeshen had reiterated on
CBC’s Homestretch program that Gondek and Calgary’s city councillors can be assured that the funding is secured. “They can bank on it,” he said.
Nenshi, who served as Calgary’s
mayor for three terms from 2010 to 2021, and who spearheaded the Green Line project, accused the Alberta government of being “political” in its decision to withdraw the funding.
“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,” he wrote in a
post on X on Sept. 4 in response to Dreeshen’s Sept. 3 letter.
“This is untenable and the people of Calgary deserve better than to be used as a political football,” added Nenshi, who was named the
new leader of the
Alberta NDP this June.
Dreeshen’s Sept. 3 letter, for its party, said it was the former mayor who placed the city in such an “untenable position” it is facing today.
The letter described the situation as having resulted from Nenshi and his “utter failure to competently oversee the planning, design and implementation of a cost-effective transit plan that could have served hundreds of thousands of Calgarians in the city’s southern and northern communities.”
‘Significant Costs and Risks’
When asked by CBC on Sept. 5 if the decision was “political,” Dreeshen said it was influenced by shortcomings in the business case and historical issues surrounding the project’s planning.“We made this decision off the business case,” the minister said on the
Alberta At Noon program, adding that Nenshi “got the ball rolling in the wrong direction.”
“When Nenshi was mayor and he was in charge of designing the Green Line plan, there was no proper engineering or costing out of what the Green Line would be,” Dreeshen said.
In another interview, with
CBC’s Homestretch on Sept. 4, Dreeshen said he did raise concerns with Gondek and Calgary city councillors after his staff reviewed the Aug. 15 business case.
“A lot of the debate goes into downtown and the tunnelling or above ground options, and those are a lot of not just the big costs, but also a lot of cost uncertainty,” he said.
“As we talk to engineers and developers of what happens when people start digging underground in Calgary, because it is so low, because it’s in the floodplain, because it’s so close to the river, anything going downtown has significant costs and risks as well to be able to contract that work downtown.”
The minister’s Sept. 3 letter said the provincial government as part of the third-party review will seek proposals that include above ground options for certain lengths of the Green Line “in order to bring some cost certainty” should those options be pursued.
The Canadian Press contributed to this report.
