Calgary Mayor: Olympic Bid Could Fund Critical Infrastructure

CALGARY, AB — Mayor Jeromy Farkas is floating the idea of another Olympic bid, seven years after Calgarians decisively rejected hosting the 2026 Winter Games. Today, he signaled openness to pursuing a future bid—tying it to fixing the city's aging infrastructure and extracting more cash from Edmonton and Ottawa.

It's a notable pivot. Back in 2018, when Farkas was a Ward 11 councillor, he voted against the bid, calling the business case shaky and the financial certainty nonexistent. Now, sitting in the mayor's chair since October 2025, he's reframing the Olympic question as leverage: Use the Games to force Premier Danielle Smith and Prime Minister Mark Carney to pony up Calgary's "fair share" for roads, bridges, and—crucially—water mains.

The 2018 Ghost Still Haunts

On November 13, 2018, 56.4% of voters told City Hall to drop the 2026 Olympic dream. The proposed tab was over $4 billion in investment, with $390 million in direct spending and a tangled web of funding commitments from three levels of government. When the feds and the province balked at the price, Council pulled the plug the day after the plebiscite.

Then-Mayor Naheed Nenshi was crushed by the result. Today, Nenshi leads the Opposition NDP in the provincial legislature. Former Mayor Jyoti Gondek, who lost to Farkas in 2025, never seriously revisited the Olympic file during her single term.

Farkas's Playbook: Infrastructure or Bust

Farkas isn't pushing for a vote tomorrow. But his comments today suggest he sees the Olympics as a vehicle—not just for medals and tourism, but for extracting infrastructure dollars Calgary badly needs. The city's water main failures this winter have underscored a massive maintenance backlog, and the mayor is betting that dangling the Olympic carrot could unlock provincial and federal wallets.

Any formal bid would require a City Council Notice of Motion, a plebiscite bylaw, and ironclad funding agreements with Alberta and Ottawa. The provincial UCP government under Smith has not signaled renewed interest, and Carney's Liberals—who took office last year—have remained silent on the possibility.

The Friction: Money, Memory, and Trust

The tension is obvious. Calgarians voted no once, loudly. The 2018 bid collapsed because governments couldn't agree on who paid for what. Farkas himself was a skeptic back then. Now he's asking voters to consider another round—but only if the price tag includes long-overdue fixes to pipes, roads, and transit.

No motion has been introduced. No formal talks with Smith or Carney have been disclosed. For now, it's a trial balloon—a mayor testing whether the second-largest city in Alberta can use the Olympic dream to shake loose the infrastructure money it's been chasing for years.

The next move depends on Council and the public appetite for another plebiscite. If Farkas wants to take this seriously, he'll need to answer the same question voters asked in 2018: Who pays, and what exactly do we get?