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.

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 million 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). 

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.