The notion of whether I was a “good Calgarian” or even a Calgarian of any stripe was never formally put to me, but on occasion I felt the unstated censure of this question. In the early 1970s, half the citizens weren’t even born in Alberta. Yet there was a public identity. Calgary revelled in its civic facade, which was then, as now, almost universally described as “brash,” and which remains a curious mixture of rebelliousness and deep conservatism. The city is defined by certain images, most famously, perhaps, that of a Calgarian riding a horse into the lobby of Toronto’s Royal York Hotel during the 1948 Grey Cup between Calgary and Ottawa (which Calgary won).
The fact that the cowboy motif was largely an entertaining fiction, a borrowed mythology that had sold well in the US, didn’t dent its effectiveness. Nor did the fact that the oil and gas industry, that Parthenon of entrepreneurial spirit and individualism, was as coddled by government as the arts. In the early 1970s, you could still hear Texas and Oklahoma accents, guiding the “awl bidness” to the Promised Land, and those north-south alliances are intact. The city continues to fight the east, the most potent and evil embodiment of which is still Pierre Trudeau’s Mephistophelean face.
“Cities are not ordained,” Jane Jacobs wrote in The Economy of Cities, “they are wholly existential.” In Calgary, the city was existential, but the identity was ordained.
An entrenched civic character is a self-fulfilling prophecy. The city attracts people who have these traits (or think they have them) and want to join the fraternity. Here, the tautological nature of civic character gets a boost from newcomers who salute the can-do spirit of the West. Calgary remains like one of those turn-of-the-(past)-century cities where boosters composed and publicly sang songs extolling the virtues of their particular town.
A civic character that holds rugged individualism as a defining trait has a natural distrust of the collective. But the collective appeared in unlikely forms, none more unlikely than Ralph Klein, mayor for three terms (1980–89), a man who corralled the civic spirit, receiving 94 percent of the vote in his last term, a record.
Whatever else you could say about Klein (that he was a totemic rather than an administrative mayor, that he was occasionally hammered), he was beloved. He was beloved for his non-establishment postures and appearance, and for being pro-establishment. In this dichotomy, he personified the city. His terms as mayor were not exercises in mismanagement, but an absence of management. He was the inert centre around which events — and money — whirled. It was as environment minister that Klein embraced mismanagement, a trend that flowered during his tenure as premier.
Beneath the veneer of Calgary’s almost doctrinaire middle class — white, prosperous, and righteous — there was a David Lynchian narrative lurking, a subterranean mood that found its most vibrant epiphany in January 1995, when Earl Joudrie, a sixty-year-old oilman of renown, visited his estranged wife, Dorothy, at her luxury condo in the northwest part of town. They were meeting to discuss their divorce, which had been pending for five years. Dorothy was wearing a sweater, black stretch pants and heels, and as their conversation ended she shot Earl in the back six times with a small-calibre pistol. Earl collapsed on the floor, and Dorothy went to the living room and mixed herself a double Seagram’s VO on the rocks. She drank it, then mixed another. She went back to see about Earl, who was alive and conscious and lying face down in his own blood. “How long is it going to take you to die?” she asked, sipping her drink.
Earl offered her a deal: if she called emergency, he wouldn’t press charges. Dorothy had come to the end of her plan (and her bullets), and had had several drinks and couldn’t really think of a clear way out of the situation. She dialed 911, and Earl was saved. Dorothy was tried for attempted murder and found “not criminally responsible.” There were mitigating factors, including the fact that Earl had hit her on several occasions during their marriage. Four of the bullets stayed in Earl until his death in 2006.
The Joudrie shooting captured the civic imagination. It was one of those crimes that defines a local zeitgeist, the way the Manson murders did in Los Angeles in 1969, or the assault on the Central Park jogger in New York in 1989. The city recognized some aspect of itself. Calgary was not held criminally responsible: wealthy, careless, snapped on rye, and holding a loaded gun; this was my town. It was my view that Calgary was filled with wives sipping Seagram’s VO and listening to their late-arriving husbands tell them that the price of West Texas Intermediate had slipped and those Arabs were Satan’s little helper and someone oughta. And as the women nodded and sipped their whisky, they were mentally pulling the trigger six times.
In October 2006, the city was in another boom, EnCana was on the verge of declaring the largest profit in Canadian corporate history ($6.4 billion), and it was announced that British architect Sir Norman Foster’s fifty-nine-storey EnCana building would be the tallest Canadian office tower west of Toronto. Named the Bow for its concave shape and echoing the nearby Bow River, it will have 1.7 million square feet of office space. One of the buildings on the site will incorporate the facade of the York Hotel, a 1930 art deco structure that was once a place for dandies, then a strip club and pleasant dive, and, more recently, low-cost public housing. The mixed-use development is estimated to cost $1 billion.
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