In June 2024 there was a catastrophic break of the Bearspaw South Water Main in Calgary, and it’s come out now that the chair of the Independent Review Panel established to present a report on this was paid $1.75 million for nine months’ work—not the work of actual forensic investigation, but the work of repeating those findings from his cushy panel chair. In January 2025, a month before chair Siegfried Kiefer presented the report, which he was billing over $1000 an hour for his work on, there was a second disastrous feeder main break.
In the report itself, there is no breaking news—only the reality that Calgary’s infrastructure, from water to electricity to roads, is not being maintained, let alone upgraded, to keep pace with the life of the city. Across the country, over 14% of all public infrastructure is rated as “poor” or “very poor” condition. The infrastructure deficit is at lowest estimate $150 billion, likely closer to a trillion dollars.
Fear not, another Water Utility Oversight Board has been appointed to talk about talking about these issues—with the compensation for its members not yet disclosed. Calgary city councillor Dan McLean says it was city officials, not the elected councillors, that negotiated and agreed to the “outrageous” compensation for the last panel, and that he was “shocked” and “pissed off” by the price tag.
For working Calgarians, who are paying McLean his $128,159 salary (which includes automatic yearly wage increases to account for inflation) from our average yearly salary in Calgary of $64,600, it only adds insult to injury to hear our elected representative complain that he had no say over the absurd costs and mismanagement of city government. In the bloated talking shop of bourgeois democracy, where decisions are really made by the unelected state bureaucracy, neither Kiefer nor McLean do much real work, and they certainly don’t work for us. Their bosses are the billionaires and the laws of the bond market. We need workers’ democratic control over our infrastructure and the commanding heights of our economy to prevent municipal disasters, stop corrupt politicians and consultants from lining their pockets off of them, and to end the 39 active long-term drinking water advisories that still prevent access to clean water in Indigenous communities across this country.
