Its hardly a secret that Calgary has been overtaxing its citizens for over a decade in order to feed the wanton spending of Nenshi and most of city council.

Businesses crushed by city tax increases last year were forced to revolt and rally at city hall in order to try and make city council understand that they couldn’t keep taxing and spending local enterprise to death in order to fund petty, pet projects.

Now with the world reaction to the COVID-19 pandemic decimating the economy, it becomes more important than ever for governments at all levels to get spending in line. Calgary stands out with its pattern of grotesque, wasteful spending on hideous, foreign public “art” projects and having a city workforce which apparently requires ten people in order to paint a green box on a road.

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The areas where the City of Calgary has spent wastefully are myriad and all are worth auditing and cutting deeply.

One of the most odious uses of tax dollars in Calgary has been the $100 million slush fund given to the Calgary Economic Development Corporation.

Nenshi and gang overtaxed Calgarians so much that they managed to build up a surplus of $100 million dollars. Rather than apply that surplus to tax relief for struggling businesses in the city, Nenshi and company decided to give it to Mary Moran and CED in order to have them piss it away in chasing pie in the sky, unicorn business investments.

Moran’s name may sound most familiar for her inept management of the Calgary Olympic Bidco which pissed away millions of dollars in a failed bid to convince Calgarians to spend billions of dollars on a vanity project for Nenshi.

Mary Moran has applied all the skills she demonstrated with Bidco to the Calgary Economic Development Corporation slush fund and predictably, she has garnered the same empty results.

With vapid initiatives from flying Calgarians to Seattle in order to have them do cute chalk drawings in a bizarre and predictably failed bid to draw Amazon to Calgary to the CED wasting years touting Rocketspace as a victory though it never actually set up shop in Calgary, Mary Moran and her cadre at CED have proven themselves as being utterly inept.

Calgary Economic Development Corporation in itself is little more than a patronage pit for favored city council insiders. That was demonstrated rather clearly when a plum appointment was given to Jason Ribeiro shortly after his “volunteer” efforts in chasing the Olympic dream for Nenshi and Moran. The whole organization should be dissolved.

While it may (though it shouldn’t) take awhile to get rid of an organization which has a mandate to draw foreign competitors into the city at the expense of existing businesses, it shouldn’t take long at all to liquidate the slush fund under CED management and give tax relief to what few businesses still remain in the city of Calgary.

We can’t afford to looks the other way any more as vain civic politicians and their chosen senior bureaucrats drain existing businesses in order to piss those funds away in the pursuit of other businesses. It is nothing less than vulgar.

There is still well over $70 million dollars sitting in the Calgary Economic Development Corporation slush fund right now and there is no excuse for them holding on to it any longer. That money must be dedicated to Calgarian businesses in the form of tax relief and it must be done right now.

That would do more for Calgary’s economy than a million hand picked kids being sent to Seattle to party and make cute chalk drawings.