City crews assess damage to the Trans-Canada Highway from a water main break in Calgary, on Dec. 31, 2025.Todd Korol/The Globe and Mail
Jen Gerson is a contributing columnist for The Globe and Mail.
As a Calgarian of many years’ residence, I have only one question to lay before the universe: What terrible water spirits hath my city offended?
More than a decade ago, a deluge took out half the downtown; a year-and-a-half ago, a catastrophic water main break forced us all into major restrictions for weeks. And, now, another failure on the same line, except in the middle of winter.
I’m seriously starting to consider the possibility that we must impose mandatory worship of the Bow and Elbow rivers in order to propitiate the watery gods of old. Let’s make an annual festival of it, and send a bouquet of flowers down the river in order to make peace with whatever forces must be avenged. This plan cannot be any less effective than the state-of-the-art fibre optic acoustic monitoring system that was supposed to sound a little alarm before it spewed enough water onto the roadway to necessitate the rescue of 13 people from stranded cars – and plunged the whole city into yet another season of cabin rules for the toilet.
Short showers. Full laundry loads. Another excuse to put off cleaning our children and our homes is yet again before us as Calgary’s emergency water supplies continue to waver amid questionable compliance. At least this time we won’t have to watch our gardens die.
I don’t mean to complain.
Calgary faces ‘new reality’ of more water main breaks until line is fully replaced, mayor says
The restrictions themselves are not worse than listening to Calgarians talk about the latest infrastructure collapse. If this example is anything like the main break that occurred in 2024, my social-media feeds will remain absolutely divided.
On one side: angry conservatives who refuse to comply with government mandates of any kind, and will treat any request to reduce water usage as the latest World Economic Forum conspiracy to starve us of modern comforts in order to implement radical depopulation and Agenda 21. Remember COVID-19 and resist the authority!
Facing off against that collection of unresolved brain worms, we have the city’s ordinarily beleaguered progressives who would chide us for our lack of civic co-operation while reminding us all to be grateful for the sheer privilege of having any clean water at all. Just think of the poor women living in countless third-world nations who must schlep all their clean water across their very own backs for countless kilometres. (And that’s to say nothing of the boil-water advisories that still exist in Canadian Indigenous communities.)
And I guess that’s technically correct, it’s just a particularly tone deaf admonishment in an era in which moving clean water into my home has long been considered one of the most basic minimum requirements of modern civilization, and even some ancient ones. This line asks us all to be grateful for almost-first-world living conditions while paying first-world property taxes.
It also comes off just a little like deflection for an incredible failure; a lowering of the bar to a height that really isn’t acceptable. All the more galling is that this is the same crowd that tends to balk at any assertion that “Canada is Broken.” Which, as we all know is a claim that is made by only the most terrible Conservative partisans – and any Calgarian who is so unreasonably entitled as to want to flush the toilet after only peeing.
Northwest Calgary business owners fear customers will shop elsewhere because of water main break
Anyway, before anyone in the rest of the country snickers too loudly, it should be noted that Calgary is hardly the only municipality to have cut corners on water pipes in recent decades.
The entire country is facing an infrastructure deficit of roughly $270-billion – and that’s just the cost of keeping our existing kit afloat, to say nothing of expansion or growth in line with population. That deficit is gradually becoming ever more apparent in the general rundown look of much of the nation. We’re getting grubby around the edges, and it’s starting to show.
As we’re seeing in Calgary, this is more than merely an aesthetic problem. The basic conditions of our quality of life can no longer be taken for granted.
Add that infrastructure deficit to all of the other files we’ve let slide in recent decades; files ranging from defence spending, regulatory capture and declining productivity, to slow-motion declines in the quality of our social safety net.
If there’s another thing I’d add to that list, it’s that these are the outcomes of a long-term leadership deficit; of a complacent country that has been able to get away with weak leaders who prioritize short-term electoral gains and symbolic gestures over making roads and pipes that work well.
If there’s one bright side in Calgary’s water supply, it’s that, at least on this front, we see some signs of improvement. The city’s very recently elected mayor, Jeromy Farkas, is performing admirably, updating Calgarians regularly about the state of the repair, and calling his own city’s administration to task for its failures. He’s given the impression of a leader who is active and engaged in both recognizing a problem, and in solving it. If we avoid any of the idiotic acrimony that assailed the city the last time this happened, I’ll lay the credit on him.
And that may be about as good as any other offering to the angry water Gods of the Alberta plains.