Stranded cars on the Trans-Canada Highway from a reported water main break in Calgary in December. 2025.Todd Korol/The Globe and Mail
The big pipe that carries the majority of Calgary’s drinking water ruptured in the summer of 2024 and then again at the end of last year. In between those two events, the city bureaucrat with overall responsibility for the utility got a big raise.
That’s not how accountability is supposed to work.
It would be wrong to blame the current civil service for problems that go back decades. An independent report laid out systemic issues with Calgary’s water utility, including underinvestment and flawed risk analysis. All of which needs to be addressed. Politicians also needed to be more pro-active in overseeing city infrastructure.
But it is fair to ask what has been done since the last major pipe break. The answer to that question suggests the same staff members can’t remain in charge.
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Providing clean, reliable water is one of the primary functions of local government. Strengthening municipal water systems is of paramount importance nationwide, where pipes have been allowed to deteriorate to a disturbing degree. City politicians and staff who preside over failure must be held to account.
The Bearspaw South Feeder Main in Calgary was constructed in the 1970s of a material that proved more fragile than expected. More breaches are likely, leading to renewed water shortages. Residents need to have the confidence that everything possible is being done to keep the taps flowing.
Calgary’s water restrictions were lifted last week after the most recent failure was repaired. And the city can point to various efforts, including fibre-optic monitoring, that have been done since 2024 to make the system more resilient. There’s also a longer-term plan to replace the Bearspaw.
That’s all well and good. But an independent report commissioned by the city after the pipe rupture in 2024 shows that more could have been done to strengthen the system.
According to the report’s authors, other cities facing similar risks have engaged in more comprehensive monitoring and pipe repairs. Their recommendations also include calls for training and procedures to prevent damaging pressure surges and emergency planning exercises to improve preparedness and reduce outage times.
All of these could have been implemented in 2024.
The report calls as well for a further acceleration of work to replace the fragile old pipe, shaving years off the original timeline. It’s inconceivable this was not originally the plan.
One key question left unanswered by the report is whether politicians were presented with these options and chose not to act, or whether staff made that decision for them. But it does say the utility had a history of providing “limited transparency into operations and risk performance” to council.
Calgary’s leaders have known about problems with the materials used to build the Bearspaw as far back as 2004, when another pipe ruptured. The city chose not to replace it or to build the sort of redundancy that let cities such as Montreal or Hamilton recover more quickly from pipe failures.
That lack of redundancy is now being blamed for inspections of the Bearspaw not being approved in 2017, 2020 and 2022. According to the city’s infrastructure chief, shutting the pipe to examine it would have required water restrictions and officials assumed it was in acceptable condition.
Effectively, the city kept rolling the dice.
The report notes that the likelihood of the Bearspaw failing was low risk, albeit with high potential consequence. So it kept getting bumped by other projects. Who made that call? The report doesn’t say, but does recommend that high-consequence risks should “receive senior management review.”
The report doesn’t call for any heads to roll, preferring to suggest mistakes were made without identifying who made them. However, it does note that the city’s chief administrative officer is the only bureaucrat with “full visibility” across the utility.
The CAO is David Duckworth. He has been in the role since 2019 and got a substantial raise last year. Last week the new mayor said that the CAO would face stricter expectations, and could be fired if he doesn’t meet them.
The CAO is the city’s top civil servant. Unless he can demonstrate clearly that he tried to impress on council the need for urgent action on the Bearspaw, keeping him in the role makes a mockery of accountability. It would be a message to all city employees that even the most important tasks aren’t really that important.