Edmonton's Chamber Wimps Out - Again!

There is a real irony in the fact that the Edmonton Chamber of Commerce has decided to be silent when it comes to the closure of the City Centre Airport.

This city's business community has been hurting the city over the airport issue for at least 10 years longer than most people think.

In the early 1980s, when scheduled passenger service from the City Centre Airport (then called the Municipal Airport, or the ‘Muni’) to Calgary was killing our International Airport's passenger load and, with it, the airport's connections to the outside world, Mayor Laurence Decore convened a series of day-long, monthly meetings of a group he called Enterprise Edmonton.

This group was composed of every politician in the Edmonton area – from all three levels of government, regardless of party – and the Presidents and General Managers of every single business-related organization in the city, including the Chamber, Northlands, the Convention Centre, Tourism and Economic Development Authorities, and of course, the Airport Authority. I attended the meetings as Decore's Chief of Staff.

Decore's single challenge to this group was: let's all agree on Edmonton's top challenges to economic growth, and let's make a plan to meet those challenges, and win.

The group heard many pitches on a wide variety of issues, but in the end, the only issue they ALL agreed on, completely agreed on, was that there needed to be a closure of all scheduled passenger traffic into and out of the Muni. Only in that way, they agreed, could we protect the International's position and allow it to compete with Calgary for airline flights.

The group had heard horror story after horror story about how the Edmonton International’s continued losses to Calgary’s gains was hurting our economy. We lost conventions. We lost brainpower. We lost branch or head offices. We lost Big time!

It was agreed that in order to make this decision 'fly' in the city, absolute unanimity had to be displayed by the politicians and groups who had come to this conclusion.

They all agreed to attend a news conference at which Mayor Decore would announce their collective decision to end scheduled passenger service to the 'Muni'.

The amazing, unbelievable, sick thing is that late on the afternoon of the very day before the news conference was to occur, the President of the Edmonton Chamber of Commerce phoned Decore and said that the Chamber was withdrawing its support because a few of its members (presumably the Kingsway Mall businesses, the Chateau Louis and Edmonton Inn hotels and some others) had objections to the Chamber taking a stand against the City Centre Airport. He said the Chamber felt uncomfortable taking a stand that didn't benefit ALL of its members.

A good politician, Decore knew he couldn't possibly win the issue if he didn't have the active support of the business community.

He killed the initiative and canceled the news conference.

And for the next 10 years, Calgary continued to win the airline flight war, and to attract more conventions and both head and branch offices.

Of course, later in the 90s, a modified shutdown of scheduled air traffic came into effect at the airport, but only after our city lost – in my opinion, given the impacts of full passenger service at our second airport that were described to the Edmonton Enterprise group – way over a billion dollars in revenues.

I believe that the decision of the Chamber of Commerce to welch on its commitment – made to every other economic development organization in the city and to all of its elected politicians – to closure of passenger service was the single most costly error ever committed against the interests of the city as a whole.

So you can see why I find it no surprise at all that, yet again, the Edmonton Chamber of Commerce has decided to sit firmly and decisively on the bloody fence on the airport closure issue!

They chickened out because (they say) it's a 'political issue'.

The hell it's simply a political issue!

It's an economic issue, an issue with profound impacts on the city's future financial health, on its image in the eyes of both its citizenry and the outside world, on the 2nd largest polytechnical college in Canada, on the cost-effectiveness of the NAIT LRT line and on oodles of other things.

Ironically, a 'new town' of 30,000 people living on the old airport site is sure to bring a big economic surge to the very businesses which have been fighting to stop change for so many years...the shopping centre and hotels in the immediate area. But Envision Edmonton and the Chamber seem to share a willful blindness of this fact.

Envision Edmonton seems essentially a group of old-fart, status quo businesspeople. And now it appears that the Edmonton Chamber isn't very different.

Isn't it ironic that the force that delivered such a big financial hit to Edmonton in the mid-80s and the forces that are working so hard today to resist (or to actively not support) positive change with big economic payoffs is, in fact, the city's business community?

Our business community has a real penchant for living in the past, no matter how hard it hurts the rest of us!