Colley-Urquhart: Don’t be so quick to dismiss CalgaryNEXT’s merits (with poll)

By Diane Colley-Urquhart on September 2015

Re: “No corporate welfare for CalgaryNEXT,” Paige MacPherson, Opinion, Sept. 9 Well — they do intend to pay for their “flashy arena desires” — not taxpayers! There were so many ill-founded politically expedient statements and assumptions in this piece that I felt compelled to respond. I did find an accurate one though — “Every use of public money is a choice made by our elected officials” — just as city council did in East Village 10 years ago by pioneering the first community reinvestment levy in Canada. We set up a separate corporate entity called the Calgary Municipal Land Corp. and told them to go to work.[...]