"The Calgary Arts Development authority could be eliminated as well. Allow individuals to fund that through their charitable donations," he said.

So Calgarians can choose between property tax hikes of 23% or whatever ridiculous number they're suggesting, or the sudden complete elimination of municipal support for the arts.

Nice.

Living in this city has been bothering me lately. It's so frustrating to live in the strongest economy in the country (assuming that's still true) with grotesquely overvalued real estate affecting everyone's access to accommodation, rented or owned, to drive on crumbling streets, to negotiate an overlooked and clearly inadequate transit system, to suffer extremely limited access to medical attention because no doctors are taking new patients, to watch gang activity flourish for lack of funding for the police, and to not even have an independent bookstore in the downtown core to frequent, not to mention a decent coffeeshop open later than ten in the evening. I feel as though we sacrifice so much here to the culture of oil and gas -- all this city's resources are directed towards making money from oil. Which is sad, but not likely to change. What I don't understand is why can't all that oil money at the very least alleviate some of the problems that could handle some money being thrown at them? Why can't they hire more police? Attract more doctors? Fix the goddamn roads? Buy a few more buses? Shouldn't all that revenue be able to shield us from massive cuts to the already underfunded arts authority, or from further inflation of our overinflated property values? Why is this city so hopelessly self-destructive?