In a city torn between frustration and optimism, Nenshi ponders which dragon we will feed in 2019

Record unemployment, high downtown vacancy, Trans Mountain pipeline delays and falling short of making a bid for the Olympics.

For Calgary City Council, it's been a big year.

And one thatneeded some creativity and a fair bit of teamwork to get through.

The coming year will brings newchallenges and opportunities, if you ask Mayor Naheed Nenshi.

With provincial and federal elections on the horizon, and the promise of $1.6 billion to assist the energy industry, Calgary could look very different a year from now.

Nenshi sat down for a wide-ranging interview with CBC Calgary's David Gray, host of the Calgary Eyeopener.Here is a portion of their conversation, in which the mayor considers the year that's gone, and the one that's just around the corner.

Gray: You have always prided yourself on reading the mood of this city, understanding what Calgary wants and needs. What's the mood of thiscity right now?

Nenshi: I think that we are seeing two contradictory moods working together right now. There is a mood of frustration and irritation but there's also a mood of great optimism.

I think that one of the critical questions for 2019 is going to be, which of those dragons gets fed?Because obviously people are frustrated for very real reasons.

'We should be frustrated ... but we need to channel that frustration,' says Nenshi

6 years ago

Duration 1:07

Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi sits down for a year-end interview with Calgary Eyeopener host David Gray.

Far too many of our neighbours are feeling the pain of unemployment right now, and the economy of Calgary has somewhat disassociated itself from the national economy, which is funny because we always were disassociated from the national economy because we were doing so much better.

We had the lowest unemployment rate in the country for many, many years, and now we've got among the highest. But what's interesting about it is, it's almost double Vancouver, it's double Quebec City, but it's also two points higher than Edmonton.

So Calgary really has disassociated itself. This is not a tenable situation for the country.You can't have the third-largest city long the economic engine of the country stay in the doldrums for this long.

On the other hand, we are in a situation where we remain one of the most prosperous places on Earth. Our average incomes here in Calgary are much higher than anywhere else in Canada. We remain one of the most educated places on Earth, and people are investing in small, medium and large-sized businesses all over the place.

So there really is a sense that there's a potential for something to happen here, that those entrepreneurswho believe in buying at the bottom are really seeing huge opportunity.

The question is, over 2019, which of those sentiments prevail, because ultimately I think the sentiment that prevails will largely guide our ability to create jobs and build the economy here.

Gray: We're entering into a turbulent political year:provincial election, federal election coming along. How do you navigate those turbulent waters for this city?Can you work with Kenney, if he becomes premier?Can you work with change at the federal level?

Nenshi: Of course,I remind people for eight years, that's why I wear purple every day. Purple is red and blue.

Nenshi expects a 'divisive and unpleasant' year of elections in 2019

6 years ago

Duration 1:50

The mayor believes he has a role to play in reminding people of the importance of inclusive community in Calgary.

The great thing about being the mayor isyou get to work with anybody and everybody.I've had five premiers in the eight years that I've been here, I've had something like nine or 10 ministers in municipal affairs from two different parties. I've worked with two different prime ministers.

Obviously you have to be able to do that because I've only got one horseand that horse is Calgary.

Now I'll tell youthat I love politics. I'm a political animal and I love elections, because elections are a great opportunity to have great big debates about what we want and about the future of our community.

I am not looking forward to these two elections because I think that we have politicians on all sides who, for short-term gain, are feeding the wrong dragon, are stoking waves of populism rather than having mature conversations about what we're trying to build as a community.

Now I personally, in city council, in these elections, will try and inject some of that. Certainly we're going to go to everybody who's running in these elections and say, "Tell us how you understand the problems we have in Calgary. Tell us what your Calgary strategy is.

"So to be specific, if you want to be premier, then we have to know some things: How are you going to protect Calgary from flood?How are you going to get that Springbank dry dam built?What are you going to do to support the work we're doing on mental health and addiction, where we're losing three or four people to overdose every single week?

"What are you going to do about job creation and about supporting not just the energy sector, but all the other areas of economic growth in Calgary?How are you going to fund infrastructure if you want to get rid of the carbon levy?How are you going to fund the Green Line, which is funded by the carbon levy?"

So these are all fair questions, and I think if you want to be premier, you ought to have answers to them. And so we're going to make sure that people understand the answers to those questions as we move forward.

Similarly with the federal government, there's questions around infrastructure, around housing, around support for the energy sector, around the economy and economic support, and we're gonna make sure that Calgarians, when they go to the polls, will really understand what their vote will mean for the City of Calgary.

Gray: Has the federal government done enough to help out this city and the challenges they face?

Nenshi: There's always more that could be done but I always say to people, what more would you want?

At some point, you've got to be realistic about this stuff. Stephen Harper talks about the transition in the energy industry,and when did we as Albertans become so sensitive that words trigger us and we see them as attacks on Alberta as opposed to, "Let's have a conversation about it?"

I'll take $1.6 billion, thank you very much. I'm happy to take $1.6 billion, and in fact I've done a ton of advocacy over the last year on the federal government, saying, "You have to make specialized investments in Alberta. You can't treat us the same as everyone else."

We've always had a level playing field tilted away from us, and now for the first time, we need the field tilted toward us a little bit. So yeah, I'm happy to take the money, thanks very much, it'll make a big difference, and I'm happy to do so with a bit of grace if I can.

But we also have to understand that we've got to fire on all cylinders at once.

We have to support market access. We have to make sure that we're getting a global good price for a non-renewable resource because selling a non-renewable resource at a massive discount is insanity. We can't do that anymore, and we have to make sure we're diversifying our markets.

We also have to make sure that we're not sticking our heads in the sand and saying, "Nothing will ever change."

For generations Liberal, Conservative, NDP governments were building our largest export industry with only one customer. There is no diversification. I'm a strategist by training. You don't do that, and of course our largest customer has become our largest competitor. U.S. is now a net exporter of oil.

So we've got to be able to do all of this at once, but never think that that three-foot-wide pipe when it gets built next year and I'm confident the Trans Mountain pipeline is going to get built that that's going to solve all our problems. We have to be working on many,many different strategies all at once.

Gray: You heard from Calgary businesses, people who are hurting because of the change in the tax base because we have empty office towers downtown. What more can you do to help those businesses out?

Nenshi: I wouldn't call that a minor issue. I think that is actually a very, very big issue for the City of Calgary.

What's happened is, the vacancy rate downtown has meant that businesses outside of the downtown, even though we've kept our taxes very low, the distribution between the businesses meant that some businesses outside of downtown have seen very, very high increases.

It's not tenable, and for two years in a row, we've capped that at five per cent. It's the best we could do using the money and the resources that we have. This year, we continue to work on that.

We'll have a conversation in the early part of 2019 about different strategies to do that. We've shifted some money from non-residential to residential so that the businesses will have a lower tax increase this year than homeowners will. So those are all parts of what we need to do here.

Ultimately the solution is, you've got to fill the downtown but that's not going to happen tomorrow and it's not going to happen this month.

So we continue to use our savings. We continue to use the limited tools we have to shield these businesses from these tax increases as the economy improves.

Butultimately, these are BandAids and I'm not shy about admitting that they're BandAids.

We have to continue to make sure that we've got other tools,including assistance from the federal and provincial governments, to ensure that these small businesses can not just survive but grow.

Gray: A month ago, we had a very divisive debate in the city where we talked about whether or not we should host the next Olympics. You expended, it seemed to me, significant personal political capital trying to make that happen, and it failed. What did you learn from that?

Nenshi: It was a very frustrating experience for many reasons, and I don't deny that I am disappointed in the results. I think we've given away a really good opportunity.

I spent a ton of time on this project but I did not advocate for it because I kept saying, I am less pro Olympics than I am pro the right deal for Calgary and a good deal for Calgary.

I fundamentally think that we got not a good deal for Calgary, a great deal for Calgary. We got it 12 days before a plebiscite. It's impossible to educate people to help them understand what's going on in that time period.

As a politician, I take a little tiny bit of solace in the fact that, between the advance poll and the actual election day, the Yes vote swung almost 17 points, which if you follow politics, never happens.

So had I had a little more runway, had we had a little more time, we might have had a different result.

But ultimately there's a reason we had a plebiscite, and it was because people were divided on this issue and we needed to hear what Calgarians thought.

They said overwhelmingly what they thought, so we move on.

Q: So finally, looking at the year to come. You're eight years into this job. You're the one politically stable thingwe'll see, at least over the next couple of years, in this city. What's your role in, to use your original metaphor, for keeping that positive, healthy dragon, pushing through this?What's your role as we go into the next year?

Nenshi: Look, I'm always an optimist. You ask me to bet, I will always bet on Calgary. That's why I do this. That's why I live here.

But I do think I have a role. As we're going to go through a divisive and unpleasant, probably, provincial and federal election, one of my jobs is to remind people of what we've got here, and to remind people that that's still fragile, that the fact that we've got this community where everyone belongs, where everyone has great opportunity we've seen it in so any parts in Europe and the United States and other places you can destroy that in a second,and we have to not destroy that.

So my job is to continue to put my pants on and go to work every day, and try and build the community and make it better.

But it's also to use the microphone that I'm blessed to be given to remind people that we exist on this land because we believe in the dignity of every human being on this land.

When I opened that library, I was so overwhelmed with emotion, I threw out my speech, becausefirst time I'd seen it was the day we opened it.

That might've been a big mistake. I don't really remember what I said but I remember part of what I said.

I said that that building is our manifesto, that that building is how we say to the world that everybody belongs, that everybody deserves beauty, that everybody deserves dignity, that everybody deserves a place where they can launch their dreams.

To me, we have to keep hammering home that message. If we look on social media, if we look on the news, if we listen to the Eyeopener every morning, we might feel like, "What's going on in the world?"

You walk into that library on a Tuesday afternoon and it is filled with kids and teenagers. It's filled with old people and new Canadians, and everyone's got a huge smile on their face. You know, it's simple. Sometimes life is simple, and that's that.

This interview has been edited for length andclarity. Listen to the full interview in the link below:

Calgary Eyeopener24:34Naheed Nenshi year end interview

Naheed Nenshi year end interview

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With files from the Calgary Eyeopener