Should we just shut it down? Downtown Calgary, that is, and let the addicts, the homeless and the criminals have it.
Is that where we’re headed?
We’re already leery to board public transit heading to the core and now the city’s considering shuttering part of the Plus-15 aboveground walkway system — one that’s served citizens well for decades — as an answer to downtown’s nastiest woes.
What a difference a few years has made to the brain trust at city hall. Remember that 100-page document celebrating the promised road to reinvention, entitled Calgary’s Greater Downtown Plan? Today, it seems as curious an oddity as those famous Dead Sea Scrolls.
Cast your mind back to when this plan first rolled off the presses with such fanfare, trumpeting a bright, new, inclusive dawn for citizens in some soon-to-be magical metropolis by the Bow. The rhetoric flowed, the path ahead was chosen and the predicted price tag was in the multimillions.
Its goal went........