With a Canadian Pacific Railway train derailed near the core of flood-battered Calgary, Mayor Naheed Nenshi is picking a fight with the railway over its safety record, while saying cities should push for more power over the industrial goods running by their backyards.
[…]
Mr. Nenshi noted a series of recent CP layoffs, asking: “How many bridge inspectors did they fire?”
Mr. Harrison said none.
h/t bdoggins
It’s too bad Nenshi is such a moron. While Calgary and a dozen other municipalities might have resources to supervise railways, thousands of municipalities do not. With thousands of different local rules to operate under, railways would be hamstrung. Did I say what a moron Nenshi is?
Nenshi is a communist. If it were up to him he would centrally plan and control everything.
It is time people wise up and realize when they attempt to block pipelines, how ,much peril there is in moving oil by rail car. It is a given that the oil is going to move, it is just a question of how.
Nenshi really blew it with his stupid comment. Every once in a while, he drops his mask. He did it again this time.
What a marooon! Let’s have every township in the country have a railway inspector and a railway bylaw committee.
It doesn’t matter if there were 10 bridge inspectors or 10,000, the bridge would still have the piers washed out from under it.
My only question is why was there a train parked on a bridge over a river in flood? Was the railyard full when it arrived?
Al in Ottawa:
Actually, parking heavy industrial freight cars of some description on a bridge threatened by floodwaters is fairly standard practise; the theory is that the additional weight would “anchor” the bridge’s piers a little better.
Mind you, perhaps they could’ve chosen something a little less, uh… toxic than shipping cars filled with petroleum products…
Garth
Lashing out at “the man” … kinda like his purple campaigning soul mate political ideal south of the border?
Community organizers unite!
and for the most part, his supporters in social media have no concept of railway right of ways in Canada, or that Calgary in this example, grew around the railway. Folks advocating for cities to yank the permits that allowed railways to build in their cities.
uff. The same types that swear all their meat comes from the grocery store, with no … concept of how it got there.
While the practice of parking trains on bridges during floods is tried and true, it has been reported that this train was moving and not used in that capacity.
It’s not a theory. Weight on the bridge adds resistance against horizontal forces.
Nenshi is so well liked in calgary it’s scary.
This is where it gets very convoluted. The eco-nuts want a disaster for it’s propaganda value, which is the real reason they oppose pipelines: they are too safe. The object is to end all use of petroleum and the more images of oil soaked birds etc the better.
If you don’t want industry don’t have the trains and if you want to have jobs and stuff delivered to your residents with less transportation expense then you have railways.
That being said, municipalities do not get to dictate trains, just like provinces are not allowed to dictate pipelines.
Calgary is not a city-state. It’s part of Canada. Transport Canada has jurisdiction over this.
The mayor needs to get some rest.
Yes, yes, I know it’s not a “theory” — I was using the phrase “in theory” in the vernacular sense of “what’s supposed to happen,” not “it’s unproven but worth a try.”
In any event, and to be fair, the interview I saw with Nenshi (full disclosure: I did not vote for the guy, though I admit he’s well-liked in Calgary) gave me the impression that he was not so much peeved that the trains were under Federal jurisdiction as he was that it was Calgary city crew members who were risking their lives to try and fix this problem. Where the Hell were the Feds? Where the Hell was the rapid heavy-duty response we should have expected from CP? In this case, I think Mayor Nenshi’s annoyance was justified.
Nobody should have to fix something that is the responsibility of someone else.
Norman >
“Calgary is not a city-state. It’s part of Canada”
Have you been to the NE recently?
Sadly, he will be re-elected. It’s the council that is more variable.
Have you been to the NE recently?
Um. I have. Nothing remarkable.
All inter-provincial (aka Federal) railways are under the jurisdiction of Transport Canada and are subject to their regulations (of which there are many). In addition to their standards & regulations, they specify compliance with AREMA, the American Railway Engineering and Maintenance of Way Association. AREMA covers EVERYTHING related to railway engineering from the bottom of the track bed to the top of the signals.
Railways that don’t pass provincial borders, such as Calgary Transit, however, are pretty much allowed to make up their own rules as they like. Actually, municipal transit systems across the country are pretty much a dogs breakfast of rules and standards. In many areas, these transit organizations fall short of meeting Transport Canada and/or AREMA standards (one example of a Transit standard practice that I can think of would likely you get fired at CN or CP), but they really have no one to answer to except civil court litigation.
Even the best regulated provinces and municipalities would struggle under the burden of maintaining the specialized railway engineering standards. I don’t know if Nenshi is aware of this or not, but without the results of the investigation into the incident he is only succeeding in pandering to local voters who view CP as a big, bad corporation.
While I have no love for Hunter Harrison, this was just a cheap shot by Nenshi.
LAS >
“Um. I have. Nothing remarkable.”
LOL no surprises, you have already proven that you live in your own little Al Qaeda/ pedophile loving little bubble on plenty of past threads.
// It’s too bad Nenshi is such a moron. //
+
No. Showing just how assimilated he is, continuing the fine old Western Canadian tradition of “God damn the CPR! ”
There was a time, a few years ago, when the Mayor of Calgary that wasn’t elected by having thousands of Facebook / Twitter friends… viewed CP moving their head office to Calgary as a great thing. The current Mayor, has no clue aside from CP being a tax cow for his purple views.
Frustratingly, this seems to be one of the cases where the Left can point to a genuine failure of “Evil Capitalism”.
The commercial rail-lines in Calgary are the only right-of-ways which aren’t subject to Municipal oversight; in other words, Calgarians are trusting the Province to maintain safe standards in our city, and we have no idea what they’re doing.
Meanwhile, the Province has passed on a lot of this responsibility to the railway companies, who in this case seem to have blown it. The bridge in question is something like a century old, built to standards that should have been updated when Trudeau handed the country over to the communists.
So after this failure – a failure which likely wouldn’t have happened, if the bridge had been held up to city standards – Lord Nenshi is stuck putting the lives of city workers at risk, for a problem they didn’t create and couldn’t have prevented in the first place.
I’d like to see some heads roll over this; I suspect there are some greased palms, somewhere down the line.
“…”How many bridge inspectors did they fire?”…”
If it turns out that there were structural defects which should have been detected but were not, then maybe some should be fired.
So let me fix that line for you:
Mr. Harrison said none………not yet!
Railways in Canada are a federal jurisdiction. Nothing to do with the province.
Airports too.
But the river the railway bridge passes over is under provincial jurisdiction.
But the river the railway bridge passes over is under provincial jurisdiction.
As long as they don’t conflict with fishing or boating.
“Calgary is not a city-state. It’s part of Canada – Norman
Have you been to the NE recently? – Knight 99”
Have lived here for 6 years now. Kind of eye opening to be a visible minority, white guy in brown neighbourhood. But calling it a city state is a bit much. Most of the locals that I talk to were advised to move to this part of the city to have some transition in culture change from old country to new. Their kids and mine all get along like kids anywhere.
Knighty seriously thinks that when brown people gather, it’s a ‘city-state/Islamo-ghetto/whatever Geller told him to think today’.
Wayne Ewart >
“Kind of eye opening to be a visible minority, white guy in brown neighbourhood”
I know what you mean, I spent many years working and travelling in both India & Pakisthan as a white minority. Now I can do it all over again when I travel to Calgary NE.
Nenshi was winning the PR war.
Then, he blew it.
My guess is that the inspectors that inspected the bridge 18 times since the flood did so from the comfort of their pickup truck.
*this is my first “hat tip” ! Thanks Kate
“Knighty seriously thinks that when brown people gather, it’s a ‘city-state/Islamo-ghetto”
Not true, I love brown people, their obviously better than you and your buddy John McCain who want to arm Al Qaeda and murder as many brown people as you can across North Africa and the Middle East.
On the other hand I don’t need to look any farther than modern day Europe to know what multiculturalism, entitlement programs, and mass Islamic immigration will bring.
I’ll drop you a video later on with Mayor Nenshi addressing Calgary constituents explaining Calgary’s demographics, who’s entitled, and how City finances will be pulled from “{richer white areas of the city, to supplement the majority non-white area of the north east, because they won’t supplement themselves}”. He also made clear that the non-white areas are not the poorest areas of Calgary, but due to “cultural priorities” they the non-white faces won’t put their money into needed infrastructure. Nice.
So Calgary will be like….every other NA city…and basically how it was before Nenshi.
All that stuff about Islam taking over Europe is horsesh*t.
LAS >
“So Calgary will be like….every other NA city” – LAS
Exactly!
“…and basically how it was before Nenshi”. – LAS
Uh, no.
“All that stuff about Islam taking over Europe is horsesh*t.” – LAS
Man, I realize there’s no helping you, but you really should get out more. Ya sound like a kid, so I get that you don’t know much about anything really. Yet there’s much more than just typical ignorant youthfulness that drives your obsessive misguidedness isn’t there?
Is it the pot LAS? I know you’ve raved about the pot a bunch.
Nenshi shouldn’t point figures about bridge failures.
Calgary Transit lost one between Erlton & Stampede stations.
Optics by CP sucked.
No damage done.
move along.
If they didn’t bother getting out of their trucks, then they will be having a long vacation… It doesn’t appear to be a long bridge so it wouldn’t take too long to do a walking inspection.
Also, the ToC for the bridge inspection manual runs to 5 pages, section 13 covers emergency inspections for things including floods.
Someone might want to point out to the Mayor that the railroad has been there for a long long time, it’s likely that most if not all deeds have an clause noting that they are close to a railroad.
Will someone please explain to Calgary’s alien mayor that western Canadian cities grew up around the railways – picking a fight with the life blood of the city’s logistics industry is an act of economic seppuku.
Someone please fire this commie dipsxxit and the one in Redmonton before they pee away any economic advantage Alberta has left.
Regurgitating Pamella Geller’s lies is not ‘getting out’.
Calgary hasn’t elected a non-Liberal mayor since 1977. Nenshi is obnoxious and dumb but hardly the worst.
“Calgary hasn’t elected a non-Liberal mayor since 1977…” Rod Sykes was mayor until October 1977. I don’t exactly know what his politics were, but having interracted with him on a few occasions on some issues, I recognized that he was a first class a$$hole. Nenshi seems pretty popular, he has to have something going for him. Even my rabidly conservative in-laws in Calgary seem to like him.
This is another Redford debacle. Nice going to those who voted for this fascist.You started this spite of the left. Knowing what she is. Just look at what she’s doing to her oppositions Town of High River.
Every week we get more like a Police State by the day. Alberta’s soul died at the last election.
Even Harper knows what’s going on.
Maybe Nenshi can hire a bunch of those public sector bridge inspectors from Quebec…..wait…maybe on second thought……
“In 2011, during the peak of the Occupy Movement, Artur and his organization received some unwelcome attention when the newly minted mayor, Naheed Nenshi, ordered them removed from city hall for preaching the gospel during Christmas.
“To be perfectly clear, this man that holds the position of mayor in Calgary did, for months, everything that he could to support the Occupiers,” Pawlowski tells Poletical. “He deliberately allowed Occupiers to break dozens of legitimate laws and made speeches defending their behaviour and called it freedom of speech.””
http://www.poletical.com/naheed-nenshis-contradictions.php
The heavy lifting was done by CP Rail personnel. The CFD provided spill and fire services, as per their agreement and judging by the interviewed reaction by the fire dude at the scene, they apparently do this stuff all the time. The only one offended seemed to be Nenshi himself, as I didn’t get that the fire dude was in any way put out by the situation.
If you want to question CP Rail’s bridge practices then question why, after just 8 years since the last “100 year flood”, Nenshi’s “boys”, or Bronco’s before him, or the Province hadn’t done much to bolster flood mitigation anywhere along the new developments on the Bow and Elbow Rivers, or anywhere else either. Too busy collecting property taxes and issuing new building permits, I’m guessing.
“In 2011, during the peak of the Occupy Movement, Artur and his organization received some unwelcome attention when the newly minted mayor, Naheed Nenshi, ordered them removed from city hall for preaching the gospel during Christmas.”
And then they get flooded out. I wonder why…the people voted for an anti-Christian, they deserve what they get.
Wow! Talk about giving ammo to those claiming Calgary is inhabited only by mouth-breathing rednecks…
However long the CPR has been here and whatever religion the elected mayor may be, there is a very real problem. The railway can do anything it wants, subject only to distant control from Ottawa, and any impact on the city is just so much collateral damage. There are a million people living around those tracks. The Mayor has good reason to be upset.
The concept of giving each municipality utter control over a national railway’s operations isn’t viable, of course. If each one-horse town can set its own standards, chaos is inevitable.
Somewhere in between lies the answer.
There are a million people living around those tracks. The Mayor has good reason to be upset.
Yeah, let’s give them some more from the public treasury. Other people’s money is the only thing that pacifies leftists. /sarc
Somewhere in between lies the answer.
Yes, let’s ‘compromise’, then nobody is happy. Typical leftist solution…