So you want to be on City Council, All thirty-three of you
Case study: Ready? Let’s hit it.
You’re sitting in the Council meeting on July 21, 2025. You’ve just spent the last two hours listening to yet another rich old guy get paid (by us) to scold the Mayor. It’s nearing 9pm and there’s a long way to go in this meeting, and the next item is a big one: whether to sell off our Energy assets. You already know that Hirsch and Dumanowski, and therefore, obviously, Hider, are in favor. The others you’re not sure about yet.
Several versions of a report by KPMG have been made available: a 5 page version, a 30-page version, a 100 page version and, it’s rumored, even a 500 page version that no one’s read. The report recommends that we spin off our Energy division into an MCC that will be wholly owned by the City, but be operationally controlled by a Board of experts whom we will have to recruit.
The motion on the table is whether to do this or not. But the real matter you all are discussing is the fact that running an energy business is difficult, and whether nine normal people who got elected to Council are able to do it? These are in-your-face questions:
Are you smart enough to govern an energy company?
Are you smart enough to learn?
Are you brave enough to try?
Are you willing to join eight other people on this grand adventure, and use this incredible, glorious asset to do the best you can for our City and its people?
The answer from Hirsch and Dumanowski was a clear No. Both (and therefore also Hider) are eager to walk away. But we’ll get back to that. Councillor Van Dyke is the first to speak.
She rightly points out that there isn’t an obvious best answer. She rightly points out that an Energy division within the City is more transparent and accountable than an MCC that necessarily guards its trade secrets. She rightly points out that the MCC will take on debt, but the City will be responsible for that debt, and the City has more and cheaper access to lending than the MCC could have. She also, with adorable dignity, asserts that normal people like her ARE able to learn something about the energy business and contribute meaningfully to governance decisions.
Knodel comes next and says nothing insightful, but states that she wants to keep the Energy business as a division within the City. Two votes against the motion.
Sharps speaks next, and offers by far the most intelligent commentary. If you’re as smart as Sharps, you easily admit that OF COURSE you aren’t equipped to run an energy business by yourself. What you need to do - and what Darren Hirsch is incapable of doing - is differentiate between Operations and Governance. If you even attempt to get into Operations, you’re done for. It is too complicated. It requires experts.
But any fair, intelligent, open-minded person can offer useful views on Governance, such as:
What is the purpose of the Energy division? Is it
to subsidize the Medicine Hat Advantage for the people who live here; or
to grow itself into a crown jewel worth multi billions; or
simply to stably supply a defined amount of power in a fiscally prudent manner?
The Governance side decides such things, so the management side can then operate the business accordingly. It may be that an MCC structure can provide a good way to carry out this work, but the structure provided in THIS proposal definitely is not it. Sharps quite correctly points out that this proposal is going to leave City Council on the hook for any mistakes, any losses, and all the political fallout if the MCC makes poor decisions. It’s going to be Council’s neck on the line for decisions made by a Board that Council doesn’t control. And Sharps is like “No, thanks. If I’m going to be held responsible for the outcomes, then I want to be responsible for the decisions.”
McGrogan and Hider have nothing to offer, but, because Hirsch and Dumanowski are in favor, both of them are, too. Four votes Yes; two votes No.
Dumanowski rises next to the surface. You feel a tightening in your chest. This is natural: nothing is more dangerous than an angry white man.
Councillor Dumanowski begins with a populist statement of devotion to the continued public ownership of our utilities, and then devotes the rest of his speech to selling off our utilities. He talks about moving beyond 30-yr old thinking and adopting new tools. He talks of making “bold, visionary and strategic” moves. Dumanowski has drunk the Kool-Aid.
Whose Kool-Aid? Administration’s. The plan to give away our Energy Division came from the people who work in that Division, and that is a problem, obviously. As someone who sits on Council you are responsible as an employer to ensure that our employees have the tools and training they need to carry out their jobs, and provide ongoing support when they run into trouble. The fact that your employees (the Energy Division) have spent several years and millions of dollars trying to destroy their own Division, to escape the oversight of Council, to take themselves private on the open market, THIS is indeed a crisis. As a member of Council, the City’s highest governing body, you need to do something.
In Dumanowski’s case, he opted for lazy, and naturally, being the self-aggrandizing speechmaker that he is, he chose to label his laziness as “visionary, bold and strategic”.
Dumanoski has been fooled by the KPMG report, and Administration’s spin on it. Admin says “This isn’t privatization, in fact, it will be harder to sell Energy assets under the MCC structure than it is now.” This is naivete stretched to incompetence. While the MCC model may make it twice as hard to SELL the division, it makes it a THOUSAND times easier to BUY the division, which means it’s 500 times more likely our Energy division will be gobbled up by an Energy giant that will sell our electricity back to us.
The KPMG report we commissioned reads like student work. “But KPMG are accountants!” you say. True, KPMG does employ a lot of accountants, but we didn’t retain accountants, we retained consultants, and a consultant’s only task is to provide the client with justification to do what the client already wants to do. The report contained no business case, no reality-based numbers, no rationale for the spin-off, asinine demands for the City to give away hundreds of millions in assets and provide millions more in funding to start the MCC, and sprinkled it with forward projections based on pure fantasy.
And it’s ok that Dumanowski failed to understand that. He can’t read a business plan, and that’s nothing to be ashamed of. Lots of us can’t. Like Hirsch, for example, who spoke next.
Councillor Hirsch gives an emotional presentation. He’s resentful. For longer than anyone else he has wanted to be a high-rolling senior executive of a prosperous energy company, but over the years the wells have dried up, the geologists have been furloughed, the costs have risen, the revenues dropped, and the globally-integrated structure of the market has beaten him down to the point where he’s ready to throw in the towel. “This has surpassed me,” he says.
Again, this is nothing to be ashamed of. Of course it is too much for one person to grasp. The problem is that Hirsch has failed to understand that he’s not supposed to understand Alberta’s entire energy industry, or make operating decisions, he’s just supposed to provide public governance of a publicly-owned asset.
By failing to understand his role, Hirsch came perilously close to failing all of us by privatizing the one thing that so many of us are counting on to help us minimize household expenses in the very near future. At least Councillor Hirsch made an honest surrender, apologizing in open Council for his inability to continue providing oversight to the Energy division in good faith, since he was unable to meet his own standards of oversight.
Dumanowski had no such excuse, no such good faith. Dumanowski, happy to mansplain to everyone how complex the Energy issues facing him were, wipes more Kool-Aid from his chin as he echoes Admin’s (naive) assurance that if the MCC doesn’t work out, we can always dissolve the MCC and go back the how things were, utterly oblivious to the tens of millions of dollars such a reversal would cost. He has every right to do what Hirsch did, and say it’s too much for him, and he wants out. That would have been honest.
What was appalling and nakedly bad-faith about Dumanowski’s approach was that, although his reasons were the same as Hirsch’s, he wrapped his surrender speech in a claim of being “bold, visionary and strategic”, as he voted to give away our Energy division.
Ramona Robins spoke next, and she said something very important. She said “We get paid about the same as Councillors in other cities around Alberta, cities that do not have an Energy division, and that means that the citizens of Medicine Hat are getting free service from City Council when they act as the Board of our energy business.”
This is a starkly fair statement. It means that, should you be elected, you will find yourself inundated with documents and emails and powerpoints filled with information that you will have to work HARD to understand and process, for no extra pay. And you might come to the decision that Darren Hirsch came to: that it just isn’t fair to ask our Councillors, for 40 grand a year, to take on such responsibility.
Know that this is coming at you, should you win a seat on Council. You’ll be on the Board of an energy company worth hundreds of millions, and you won’t understand hardly anything about it. That case of imposter syndrome is so terrifying that four current Councillors and two former ones tried to take control away from Council, to rid themselves of the stress and responsibility. They failed, but that means it will be up to you, and you’d better be ready to seek help, because you’re going need it.
Robins concluded with a lucid observation: The citizens of Medicine Hat are struggling to pay their bills, and nothing in the KPMG report says the MCC is going to help with that, so she’s voting No.
Shila Sharps then asked to speak once more, much to her credit. In general it’s poor form to speak more than once on any motion, but Shila got back in there to tell Dumanowski he was being an ass, and his rancid commentary about “courage” and “vision” were self-serving and unappreciated.
So there you sit. Sharps, Van Dyck, Knodel and Robins against the MCC. Hirsch, Dumanowski and (therefore obviously) Hider in favor. McGrogan, apparently lost, wanders into their Yes camp. Clark yet to speak. Have you made up your mind? This could be a close one. It may come down to you.
Clark clarifies that the near-to-medium term costs the Energy division faces will be the same regardless of whether the MCC is adopted or not. She acknowledges that there are complex challenges in running the Division, but the skills can be acquired through hiring new managers, rather than spinning off the Division under the control of an independent Board. And she adds that the concerns of the citizenry regarding transparency in pricing can be largely addressed through the creation of a rate review committee. Clark opposes the motion, which was defeated 5-4.
It was THAT close, Council hopeful. And if you get on Council, it may be you making that crucial tie-breaking vote. Had Hirsch and Dumanowski had their way, we would now be millions of dollars into a transition that leads either to the eventual loss of our Energy division to the highest bidder, or else a reversal of this course back to where we are now, but at the cost of many millions in damages.
Here’s what I hope you will take away: you’re biting off a really big chunk of chew here, and it’s going to demand a lot of you if you win. You’re going to need to really understand that your job is to GOVERN, not manage, not operate. We’re only going to ask you, and expect you, to do your best. We hope to have a Council we can respect, and appreciate, and be proud of. And I, for one, hope you have a hell of a time doing it. You could do worse than following Shila’s example - take the challenge, because it’s there. Now go win, and have fun.