Alberta premier says province might impose oversight of Calgary's water system after latest break

Alberta Premier Danielle Smith is calling Calgary's second catastrophic break of the same feeder main in less than two years a failure of oversight, and says it might be time for the province to step in and take some responsibility for supervising the city's water system.

The premier also put the blame for the infrastructure failure squarely on the now-leader of the provincial NDP, Naheed Nenshi, who was Calgary's mayor from 2010 to 2021. 

Smith said Nenshi bears political responsibility for not taking more action to inspect the feeder main in the years after the massive 2013 floods.

“You have to ask the question, 'well huh, who was the mayor after the floods of 2013 until he just decided to retire?' And that was Naheed Nenshi,” Smith said. 

“All of this should have been identified early so that now subsequent mayors are not having to deal with this.” 

For his part, Nenshi pushed back, calling Smith’s comments “total garbage," and pointed to the fact there were no feeder main breaks during his time in office.

“This is very emblematic of this government. Rather than actually trying to help, or solve the problem, or act as adults in an emergency, they lash out, they look for someone to blame and they look for political gain,” Nenshi said. 

Smith said her government will consider implementing more oversight of the city’s water system, as she says they do with other utilities, like natural gas and electricity. 

“Water systems are 100 per cent, at the moment, municipal responsibility,” Smith said Friday at a news conference in Calgary. 

That oversight could include the province issuing repair orders as it sees fit. Smith said future provincial funding could be tied to the province having greater oversight of the water system.

But Kerry Black, an associate civil engineering professor at the University of Calgary, said the city has the level of expertise to oversee the system, and is best equipped to handle it. 

She said the provincial role, along with the federal government, should be to provide funding when it comes to badly-needed critical infrastructure upgrades. 

“This could have happened in Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, Edmonton, anywhere,” Black said. “It's not a question of pointing fingers and figuring out who's to blame. It's a question of, how are we going to manage this right now?” 

Smith pointed to issues with leaks in Calgary’s water system as an example for why the province might need to intervene.