Water crisis is an example of what happens when virtue-signalling projects out-prioritize boring infrastructure spending

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As I was assembling notes on how electing progressive mayors and councillors seems like harmless fun until your city crumbles, news came that Calgary’s water infrastructure had crumbled. What a metaphor for modernity: rainbow crosswalks over busted water mains.

I think a lot of normal people vote for left-wing politicians, including municipally, expecting some annoyingly weird flags, curious neologisms and zany episodes. But they think in return they’ll get a kinder, gentler country, province, state or city where adults still protect them from government insolvency, rampant crime or economic ruin. Well, they won’t.

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Look at San Francisco, Vancouver, or any number of places with festering tent encampments, open-air drug use, skyrocketing violence, filth, disorder and collapsing tax bases. By now we’re not even surprised by, say, this Boston Herald headline: “The tents are gone, but the crowds and drug use are back at Mass & Cass.”

At least we shouldn’t be. As Tristin Hopper recently noted in the National Post, “Barely a decade after British Columbia was emblazoning its licence plates with the slogan ‘best place on Earth,’ a new poll finds that one third of the province doesn’t want to live there anymore.” Sure, when I lived in Vancouver decades ago........

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