I find myself a little bit fascinated with the story of the main water feeder pipe break in Calgary, mostly because of what it exposes about municipal politics in this country. Council was presented with a report today that shows that they were warned about this twenty years ago, and that nobody did anything about it during all that time. Twenty. Years. The report was commissioned after the 2024 pipe break, and here it is, broken again, because they didn’t finish the job.
Here is the independent panel's timeline of how risk was identified with the Bearspaw Feeder Main 20 years before it ruptured in June 2024.
— Adam MacVicar (@adammacvicar.bsky.social) 2026-01-07T21:19:54.037Z
City councils didn’t prioritize it because they have been so preoccupied with keeping property taxes as low as possible that these kinds of major infrastructure projects continue to be underfunded and overlooked. City staff apparently have unclear reporting structures so nobody becomes responsible for this kind of an issue, and the author of the report was saying he wouldn’t lay the blame on any one individual or era of council. “This problem existed. It repeated itself. It did not surface to the right level of decision-making. And so it’s very difficult, in my opinion, to lay specific blame on any individual. We had a process weakness that was not corrected.”
The thing is, we have a lot of city councils in this country who are also focused solely on keeping their property taxes down, and placating NIMBYs, and we there is other critical infrastructure in this country that is bound for failure. Councils adopt a learned helplessness when city staff don’t do their due diligence about these kinds of failures, and vanishingly few councils are doing their jobs in ensuring these kinds of issues are actually being dealt with. This could be a warning for other cities to take a second look and ensure that they are doing the inspections and maintenance that was ignored here…or they will rely on normalcy bias and leave it for later because clearly it won’t happen to them, right? I have a feeling I know which is more likely.
Ukraine Dispatch
Russia attacked two seaports in the Odesa region on Wednesday, while late-night strikes knocked out power in two southeaster regions.