Jen Gerson: This would have been Calgary's Olympics

The 2018 Olympics plebiscite was an early warning of something that wasn’t being addressed and hasn’t been since.

By: Jen Gerson

One of those ironic photos has made the rounds on social media of late; it features a young man signing a petition in support of holding a separation referendum in Alberta — while wearing a Team Canada jersey.

It was one of those impossibly incongruous images that captures the gestalt of the province’s secession movement. The young man probably thought nothing of donning Team Canada reds — the Olympics are currently in Milan. After all, why do so many of them so resent being called “traitors,” as B.C. Premier David Eby recently said? It’s because they think they are the real patriots. Their mission via secession is to preserve a nostalgic provincial monoculture from the broken liberalism of ... well, Canada. That’s not traitorous in their minds — it’s patriotism taken to its ultimate extreme. Nationalism, if you will.

Looking at that picture, I also couldn’t help but remember something else: 2026 could have been Calgary’s Olympics, not Milan’s.

And while I can’t disagree with the choice the city made to forgo the chance to host another Games, I also have to wonder if the separatists would be ticking along with a petition to collect 178,000 signatures with such gusto at present if Calgary had invested in a project that could have brought the city, province, and nation together. If it had chosen to see everyone as being on the same team.

I say that as someone who was highly skeptical of that bid at the time and remain so. Nonetheless, it’s hard to miss the through-line between that early populist uprising that derailed the city’s elite aspirations, and the glum state we see today.

Rewind, for a moment, to 2018. After successive economic disasters and corruption scandals, the International Olympic Committee was in dire need of a city to host 2026. Calgary was a natural choice.

A winter city, close to mountains, and with a proud history of successfully hosting the Games in 1988. Much of the sports infrastructure could have been repurposed for another run — in fact, the Olympics would have forced a necessary refurbishment for facilities that have since closed.

Chastened by previous disasters, both the IOC and Calgary seemed keen to replicate some of the galvanizing magic of 1988 while also keeping costs low.

2018 also shared similarities with the ‘80s. The city’s economy was suffering due to a major oil and gas slump — exacerbated in the ‘80s by the National Energy Program. In 2018, about a quarter of Calgary’s office towers had been vacated due to lack of tenants.

And then there was the bid itself.

In the days leading up to the plebiscite on whether to host the Games, advocates were still working through the potential costs and benefits. No one could trust that the proposed budgets wouldn’t suffer massive overruns.

Indeed, at that point, no Olympics had met its spending targets since 1968. The Sochi Olympics just four years earlier came in at 280 per cent over budget, and included mega-structures, roads, rail links, and bridges that rapidly fell into underuse once the Games were finished.

The last city that promised a penny-pincher Olympics — Tokyo 2020 — found its budgets spiralling out of control long before COVID hit.

And that was before Calgarians began to dig into the legacy of white elephant projects, and IOC corruption.

In short, Calgary 2026 could have been a hopeful marquee event to pull the city out of its oil slump.

It didn’t happen. Why?

Because in 2018, the city held that plebiscite to ask citizens if they supported a vision for Calgary 2026. The vote failed, with 56 per cent opposed. The result was an incredible blow to the bid’s proponents, who were stunned that a project so far along, so evocative of the nostalgia of 1988, and so widely supported by all the right people, could be so roundly rejected.

But too many citizens had simply lost trust in both the local and international institutions required to pull off such a project, and there was little faith that they would keep spending and priorities firmly squared on the best interest of the public.

The pro-Calgary-2026 crowd was polished, backed by the city, led by then-mayor Naheed Nenshi. This was the professional set, well-heeled, prone to optimism — and perhaps not as exposed to the economic reality of the typical voter.

Team No, on the other hand — and again, here, I was among them — was far less organized, more skeptical of the upside, and more distrustful of a leadership class that seemed to be too easily flattered by a bunch of cosmopolitan snake-oil sellers.

The problem isn’t that Calgary 2026 would have been bad; it’s that the critiques that brought the idea to heel were valid.

Only a few weeks ago, one of Calgary’s main water lines broke — again — due to repeated and systemic negligence of basic infrastructure. We faced significant and extended water restrictions for the second time in as many years. I cannot imagine the pressure of getting that line repaired only weeks before hosting an international event in which the city would have been set to welcome millions of visitors.

This point ought to be too straightforward to require making, but if you can’t keep the basics like roads and pipes running, then you can’t expect people to take a gamble on multi-billion-dollar feel-good projects.

“All successful revolutions are the kicking in of a rotten door,” in the words of economist John Kenneth Galbraith.

I don’t regret opposing the 2026 bid at the time. But I do think, now, that it was a missed opportunity. We lost a chance to create something that might have evoked the same sense of purpose and pride that 1988 did — and that opportunity was missed because we were failing at something more fundamental.

There was something rotten at the door of our civic infrastructure even then. The 2018 Olympics plebiscite was an early warning of something that wasn’t being addressed and hasn’t been since.

And that populism and distrust, it rolled right into the next thing — COVID — where it festered and grew, in part due to errors of the governing class, and in part due to misinformation, and in part because these sorts of things just start to take on a momentum of their own after a while.

And now, the next thing, separatism — driven by the same personalities and networks and dynamics that gained profile and stature during the pandemic.

I know that separatists like to present their project as a hopeful one; the movement that will force the elites to, finally, stop and pay attention to their problems. To change something — anything, really.

But I find the cheerful facade plastered across the reams of AI-generated pro-separatist propaganda now flooding my social media feeds to be insincere. At its heart, this is a deeply nihilistic movement. These are people who are so daunted by the prospect of winning actual elections, succeeding in real policy disputes, or making reasoned gains in the culture wars that they’ve simply given up. They are putting their hopes in the fantasy Republic that will spring from the ashes of the fire they start. They are finding solace in a retreat from reality.

And there’s just no future in that.

The real patriots are the ones who confront the actual world, flaws and all, and accept the inevitability of compromise. They’re the ones who can both see the rotten door and be willing to fix it. Repair the pipe, steady the spending, address the corruption, and regain enough public trust to be confident that the next Olympic bid can succeed. That is the work that has now been put before us. Get on with it.

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