The Shameless Herald & The Terrified Establishment

CivicCamper Naheed Nenshi has an excellent op-ed piece in today’s Calgary Herald making a tidy, reasonable case for Plan It.

Possibly the most curious feature of the online version is the little disclaimer at the end: “(Read The Editorial Board’s Differing Point Of View On Plan-it. Go To Licia Corbella’s Blog, Corbella Report, At calgaryherald.com).”A simple little line, right? Just a simple little for-more-info line. Actually, this is unlike anything I’ve ever seen in a mainstream Canadian newspaper, so  if you’ll indulge me, I’d like to deconstruct it at some length.

There are two striking things about this disclaimer. First off, I might just be a naive cub reporter with a mere dozen years’ experience in journalism, but as I said, never in all my days have I seen a qualifier like this added to an op-ed. The whole rationale behind editorials not having bylines and op-eds (“opposite editorial,” ostensibly referring to physical location on the page but also obliquely to the content) always being bylined is that editorials are the consensus opinion of the paper’s own editorial board and op-eds only represent the opinion of the bylined author. In other words, op-eds by nature differ from the editorial board’s take on things.

Point being this is way, way outside standard operating procedure for newspapers. It’s also, by the sort of measures they teach you in j-school, a shameless and appalling breach of ethics, only a thin sliver removed from reworking the text itself to warp the writer’s POV without his consent. It also scans as fussy, handwringing. In a word: anxious. It says: “Please, please, please, Herald reader, don’t think we agree with this guy.”

Which brings me to the second striking thing about it: This is the voice of a terrified establishment. Combine it with the hasty, sloppily reasoned delay motion on Plan It being brought before Council on Monday by a quartet of the most famously pro-status quo, developer-philic aldermen in the city, and you’ve got a portrait of an established order running scared.

(L to R: Herald editorial board house cat [w/o courage], unnamed Urban Development Institute spokesperson [w/o brain], official mascot of Plan It delay motion [w/o heart])

Since at least Ralph Klein’s heyday, City Council has acted as a sort of public adjunct of the development industry, its aldermen’s campaign coffers, as Naheed points out, stuffed to the tune of as much as 90 percent by developers alone. Calgary has long been a backslapping, backroom town. A place where deals were cut on the golf course or over steaks at Hy’s. The public? Kept in the dark, stymied by impenetrable bureaucracy, turning out to vote at less than 30 percent? An afterthought verging on a nonentity.

This is why imagineCalgary – quite possibly, as it claims, “the largest community visioning process of its kind anywhere in the world,” and certainly the most thorough attempt in the city’s history to paint a composite portrait of the will of its citizens – is poison to the old guard. This is why Plan It – the legislative expression of the imagineCalgary vision, already watered down a bit by the development industry but not enough when you’re used to getting exactly what you want all the time – has that old guard in a blind panic.

They’ve brought in a sham expert from the hardcore libertarian Cato Institute (whose take on urban planning is a direct analogue to the concepts of sound financial management practiced on Wall Street during the Bush years). They’ve leaned as hard as possible on their City Hall adjuncts, who’ve rolled over on their backs like weak pack hounds beneath the jaws of the alpha pooch with this pointless delay motion. And now their shameless defenders at the tired ole Herald have started mealymouthing and disclaimering even the most reasonable dissent from the party line on Plan It.

Listen: you can hear their knees knocking. They’re scared. Let’s keep organizing. Let’s build CivicCamp up and out, let’s overflow the Council Chambers on Monday in a sea of hopeful blue, and let’s make sure, finally, that the city’s future reflects the will of its citizens, not its deep-pocketed development industry.

(Disclaimer: This differing point of view belongs to Chris Turner alone and does not necessarily reflect the views of all CivicCampers, the publications he sometimes writes for, or his family cat.)