Fire Calgary's City Manager

Fire Calgary's City Manager

Last week, the Bearspaw South Feeder Main burst for the second time, disrupting water service to Calgarians.

The feeder main first failed in 2024, prompting the City to commission an expert report to investigate what went wrong.

That report was released on Wednesday.

The report provides a lot of interesting background and details, but its primary findings simply confirm what those of us who watch City Hall closely have known for a very long time.

For over a decade now, City Hall has prioritized pet projects, wasteful spending, and “nice-to-haves” over focusing on its basic, core responsibilities.

The result of these misplaced priorities is obvious: our basic City infrastructure is crumbling. 

The report doesn't name any specific individuals, but it makes clear that, overall, there has been a complete failure of City Administration.

It makes it clear that the City has known about these problems with the City's water infrastructure - and this particular pipe - for over a decade.

The pipe was listed as high risk in numerous reports, and more investigative work, assessments and reports were all planned - but nothing was actually done until the first failure in 2024.

For Administration to have known how serious this problem was, and to fail to do anything about it for so long is simply incompetence.

And at the top of that Administration is David Duckworth, Calgary's Chief Administrative Officer (the City's fancy new name for "City Manager").

Duckworth was originally hired in 2018 by former Mayor Nenshi as the City's General Manager of Utilities (you know, water pipes and such).

He was then promoted by Mayor Nenshi to City Manager in 2019.

While no one expects Mr. Duckworth to have personally inspected every water pipe, the structure of City Hall makes the Chief Administrative Officer ultimately accountable for the performance of all staff and departments.

In fact, the Chief Administrative Officer is the only person that City Council can hire and/or fire.

The Chief Administrative Officer is then responsible for hiring and managing every single other staff member under them at the City.

This extraordinary power is designed to help prevent the politicization of staff appointments in City departments, but in return, it is supposed to come with an extra high degree of accountability at the top.

The Chief Administrative Officer is the only person in the entire Calgary bureaucracy who is accountable to City Council (and therefore us as citizens).

Duckworth is not solely responsible for every mistake made at City Hall.

But he is solely responsible for the system, and the system is clearly fundamentally broken.

Administration failed to address repeated warnings, failed to prioritize core municipal responsibilities, and failed to ensure essential services and infrastructure are properly managed.

Calgary needs new leadership at the top - someone who wasn't involved in the problems of the last 15 years, someone who is willing to challenge and fix a broken system, someone who will restore accountability across City Hall, and someone who will get the City focused back on the basic, essential services that Calgarians rely on every day.

Our infrastructure is failing, our essential services are at risk, and accountability has been ignored for far too long.

It's time for City Council to take action.

If you agree, please sign our petition calling on City Council to Fire Calgary's City Manager: