What happens when the right person gets the job

[Departed]

‘The voice of all Calgarians’: Flood leaves Mayor Naheed Nenshi with Superman status

Dean Bennett, Canadian Press | 13/06/28 | Last Updated: 13/06/28 1:35 PM ET
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FacebookPosters for the recent "Man of Steel" superman movie have been altered in Calgary to add Mayor Naheed Nenshi's face.
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The face of Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi with his Clark Kent glasses has been superimposed on Superman posters by grateful citizens in his flood-stricken city.

Ads for the new movie Man of Steel have pictures of his head on them. Other posters are suggesting: “Keep Calm and Nenshi On.” His smiling face, with goggles and snorkel, is appearing on T-shirts.

But as the floodwaters recede and the politics of reconstruction wash over him, Nenshi will likely face one of his greatest political challenges, says his former campaign adviser.

“It’s going to be a hot seat, isn’t it?” Stephen Carter said in an interview this week.

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Inevitably, said Carter, disaster relief does not match everyone’s needs, wants or priorities — and Nenshi, cap in hand, will have to navigate through two levels of government for the support Calgary will need.

Premier Alison Redford has promised an initial $1 billion to help with recovery efforts, but the scope of devastation in Calgary and southern Alberta will undoubtedly be much higher.

“[Nenshi] is going to be in the position where he’s going to have to advocate for his citizens. It’s going to put him in a position of conflict with the province and a position of conflict with the federal government,” Carter told The Canadian Press.


frontiermetropolis.comfrontiermetropolis.com is selling Keep Calm and Nenshi On.
But, he said, Nenshi has an ace in the hole.

“He’s clearly the voice of all Calgarians.”

Nenshi, 41, is a first-term mayor who gained national attention when he used a campaign orchestrated by Carter and heavy on social media to beat the perceived front-runners in the 2010 municipal election. He became the first Muslim leader of a major Canadian city.

Superman status was solidified last week when he buzzed home from Toronto as the Bow and Elbow rivers that run through Calgary surged over their banks and swamped the downtown and low-lying neighbourhoods — damaging the homes and livelihoods of thousands of his citizens.

He worked for 43 straight hours: tweeting, imploring, directing, assisting, cheering on and cheering up residents who saw homes ruined and possessions literally float away.


He was cheerleader, director, benevolent scolder.

Help your neighbours, he exhorted, be it with a shovel or a ride. Hug your emergency providers.

His new “home” became the back seat of helicopters or in front of news cameras. He provided updates several times a day — one in the middle of the night.

He used Twitter to get the word out. Well-wishers finally started a social media movement to get him to go home and take a nap.


Ted Rhodes/Calgary HeraldTax payers in arms, Mayor Naheed Nenshi and Beverly Anderson, share a laugh as they both pay their property taxes at a temporary city office set up in the Rose Kohn Arena Thursday June 26, 2013.
Mr. Nice Guy disappeared on Thursday when Nenshi took a run at Canadian Pacific Railway for a bridge failure that left tanker cars loaded with an oil product teetering above the swollen Bow River.

He said he had a lot of concerns about the company’s inspection of the bridge.

“When was that bridge inspected? Why was it not inspected after Saturday? Remember, on Saturday the Bow River was still running higher than anyone had ever seen in their lifetimes,” he said.

“We’ve seen a lot of people lose their jobs at CP over the last year. How many bridge inspectors did they fire?”

Another Nenshi news conference days earlier went viral when he plain-spokenly denounced yahoos in canoes and boats on the dangerously raging waters of the Bow.

Time spent saving them was time and resources not being used where they were needed, he stated.

“It’s selfish and it’s ridiculous,” he said.

“I have been told that despite the state of local emergency I’m not allowed to invoke the Darwin law,” he said in a reference to people who do themselves in through their own reckless foolishness.

It was vintage Nenshi, anger leavened with humour to deliver a vivid message, said political scientist Keith Brownsey.

“There is this idea of individual rights in this country without any concept of responsibility to the larger community,” said Brownsey, a professor at Mount Royal University in Calgary.

“Nenshi reminded us that we do have a larger responsibility. We’ve seen that exhibited in Calgary — and he’s led it.”

Across Canada, bloggers and commentators on news sites have lauded Nenshi. Others have despaired that in an era that has produced embattled Toronto Mayor Rob Ford and Insert-Name-of-Latest-Montreal-Mayor-Here, a leader can qualify for secular sainthood by simply doing his job.

Brownsey agreed that crisis leadership can be simple, but added that not everyone is up to it.

Nenshi reminded us that we do have a larger responsibility. We’ve seen that exhibited in Calgary — and he’s led it
“[Nenshi] has been everywhere. He’s been tireless. He has said all the right things. He’s set a tone of calm. He’s set a tone of determination.

“When you have citizens telling him he should go and get some sleep, you know he’s done something right.”

In a sense, the crisis was in the wheelhouse for the man who came from relative obscurity to win the mayor’s job on a platform of community activism.

Even before the flood, he wore a button with the No. 3 on it to urge Calgarians to do just three things to better their community.

Carter said Nenshi is a master of social media, forging relationships and trust one tweet at a time. He answers as many messages as he can, said Carter, and if he has to farm out responses, he makes it clear he’s doing so.

The Nenshi tweet is the real deal.

“The one-to-one interaction is staggering,” said Carter.

“He keeps up with them all. He uses the medium as it was designed to be used — as an interactive communications technique. He doesn’t use excuses like ’I’m too busy.’ He does it all himself.”

Nenshi’s life is a blur of activity and achievement.


His family is from Tanzania. His mother was pregnant with him when the family came to Toronto in the early 1970s. He was born there and then moved with his family to Calgary, where he grew up.

He was a kid from a working-class neighbourhood in Calgary’s northeast. He was, and is, a voracious reader. He started when he was two with TV Guide and comic books.

As a kid, he was a ham. He acted in community productions until, he once said, he looked stage left and stage right and realized the worst actor was him.

He’s artsy and loves movies. He grew up lining up early for the Calgary Folk Music Festival.

But the left brain works as hard as the right.

He’s a wonk, a braniac. He earned his bachelor of commerce degree from the University of Calgary and studied public policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.

Cities are his passion, his academic love: how they function, how the interplay of forces enriches or atrophies a community.

He taught business at Mount Royal and despaired at urban sprawl that was chewing up prime land to churn out tract housing costing far more in infrastructure, he said, than could ever be returned in property taxes.


Tijana Martin/ Calgary HeraldMayor of Calgary Naheed Nenshi speaks to volunteers at McMahon Stadium before they headed out to various flood damaged areas to help clean up on Monday, June 24, 2013.
A city, he believes, is only as vibrant as its core. Building on the edges creates a socio-economic centrifugal force that spins life away from downtown.

On city council, he has won battles and lost some on reducing the inevitable sprawl in an oil-powered metropolis bursting at the seams with newcomers.

A big blow to building up his downtown came with his failure to get approval for secondary suites.

He is running for the job again in October. And while a week is a long time in politics, he is considered a shoe-in, a rare candidate enjoying a honeymoon period with voters before the vote.

Said Carter: “This flood crisis has crystallized that there is one leader on council — and it’s Naheed Nenshi.”

http://news.nationalpost.com/2013/06/28/the-voice-of-all-calgarians-flood-leaves-mayor-naheed-nenshi-with-superman-status/

 

[Departed]

Installment 2.....a step forward for the UK.

Carney and Draghi declare ‘monetary independence’ from rising U.S. rates

Bloomberg News | 13/07/05 8:24 AM ET
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Jason Alden - Pool/Getty ImagesMark Carney marked his debut at the Bank of England with the central bank releasing a rare statement in which it said the recent increase in market rates “was not warranted by the recent developments in the domestic economy.”
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European central bankers broke new ground to protect their economies from a U.S.-led surge in bond yields, indicating they will keep benchmark interest rates low for longer than investors bet.

With rising market borrowing costs posing fresh threats to weak expansions, Bank of England Governor Mark Carney and European Central Bank President Mario Draghi gave greater clarity over their monetary policy thinking yesterday in the hope financial markets will correct.

The pound and euro slid against the dollar, while bonds and stocks rose as both officials used rhetoric to distance themselves from Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke’s signal that the U.S. is preparing to start unwinding its $85- billion a month bond-buying program later this year. That had sparked a global selloff in bonds, forcing up yields in economies less able than the U.S. to cope with tighter credit.

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“The ECB and BOE are declaring their monetary independence from the rising U.S. rate trend,” said Michael Saunders, chief western Europe economist at Citigroup Inc. in London. “It’s the right thing to do, because European economies need low rates.”

The euro slid 0.3 percent to $1.2881 at 11:57 a.m. in Frankfurt, after dropping 0.7 percent yesterday. Portugal’s 10- year bond yield, which climbed as high as 8.11 percent on July 3, slid 30 basis points to 6.972 percent. Italian yields dropped a second day.

Carney, marking his debut at the helm of the BOE as the first foreign governor in its 319-year history, went first as the U.K. central bank released a rare statement in which it said the recent increase in market rates “was not warranted by the recent developments in the domestic economy.”

Less than two hours later, Draghi told reporters in Frankfurt that the ECB planned to keep its interest rates low or even lower for an “extended period” and that it was injecting a “downward bias in interest rates for the foreseeable future.”

The central banks turned to words over deeds as both kept their key interest rates at 0.5 percent, matching the median forecasts of economists surveyed by Bloomberg News. The BOE also left its bond-buying program unchanged at 375 billion pounds ($565 billion).

Britain’s currency slid 1.4 percent yesterday, and was little changed at $1.5050 as of 1:26 p.m. in Tokyo. The euro was also little changed, at $1.2901 after a 0.7 percent drop yesterday.

The statements followed a rout in bond markets triggered by Bernanke on June 19. Ten-year U.K. government bond yields rose to 2.59 percent on June 24, the highest since 2011. In the euro- area, Portugal’s 10-year yields climbed above 8 percent this week for the first time since November amid concern austerity fatigue is taking its toll. Rates also rose in Italy and Spain, both of which have struggled to grow amid Europe’s debt crisis.

With short-term borrowing costs so low, central banks worldwide are increasingly adopting what economists call forward guidance to persuade investors they should restrain yields on bonds. That’s vital for the health of economies because it is those longer-term rates which typically dictate the lending rates paid by governments, companies and homeowners.

“What the central banks made very clear is perhaps the relation we saw in the past, where once the U.S. started to hike interest rates that was closely followed by other central banks, maybe that is not the case this time around,” said Martin van Vliet, an economist at ING Bank NV in Amsterdam.



U.S. central bankers have nevertheless gone to great lengths to stress that a slowing of quantitative easing doesn’t spell an imminent end to low interest rates. Officials are talking about a “dialing back” rather than an exit, according to Fed Bank of Dallas President Richard Fisher.

“Recent central bank communication has had the look and feel of a globally co-ordinated action to pour cold water over financial market expectations of early rises in short-term interest rates,” said Nick Kounis, head of macro research at ABN Amro Bank NV in Amsterdam.

The clearer communications in Europe mark a new strategy from both central banks. The BOE has tended to release a statement only when changing policy and several officials have questioned the potency of giving guidance. At the ECB, Draghi and predecessor Jean-Claude Trichet routinely said they never pre-committed on policy decisions.

The latest efforts are nevertheless softer than those adopted elsewhere. The Fed, for example, has previously set time frames for loose policy and went further in December by saying it wouldn’t raise its rates until specific inflation and unemployment thresholds were breached. The Bank of Japan says it is focusing policy on achieving 2 percent inflation in two years.

The BOE is studying whether to pursue more formal guidance, and the analysis due for release next month will have “an important bearing” on August’s policy discussions, it said. Before then, the central bank will publish minutes of yesterday’s meeting on July 17, showing how Carney and other officials voted on stimulus

Investors “believe that the statement is a downpayment of a more substantive commitment to maintain low rates to be unveiled in August,” said Simon Ward, chief economist at Henderson Global Investors in London.

Trevor Greetham, director of asset allocation at Fidelity Worldwide, said the U.K. is likely to echo the Fed by saying it will keep policy loose until unemployment falls to 6.5 percent so long as inflation expectations remain tame. Still, some BOE officials, including chief economist Spencer Dale, have raised concern about signposting policy. Among the concerns is a risk to credibility if they had to renege on a commitment, and the fact that inflation is faster than the bank’s 2 percent target.

Draghi said the ECB’s use of guidance was “unprecedented” and backed by all 23 members of the Governing Council after several forms were debated. It may have been a compromise after what he described as an “extensive discussion” about cutting interest rates. He said the bank kept an open mind on whether to drop the deposit rate below zero.

The ECB’s ability to mimic the Fed is limited because its main focus is on inflation, and unemployment rates vary across its 17 nations.

It hasn’t built formal frameworks or set specific economic targets for assessing the course of rates, according to an official familiar with its deliberations. Instead, officials will rely on the central bank’s traditional “two pillar” approach, a setup that looks at both money supply and a range of economic indicators, the person said.

Still, Tom Vosa, an economist at National Australia Bank in London, said that with Draghi saying monetary policy is expected to support activity into 2014, it may take until 2015 for the ECB to tighten.

The U.K. and euro-area economies might recover under current policies if recent data are an indication. While euro- area unemployment rose to a record 12.2 percent in May, confidence in the currency bloc jumped to the highest level in more than a year in June and a gauge of manufacturing and services output improved for third month.

In the U.K., services and manufacturing growth accelerated to their fastest in more than two years in June, while construction expanded the most in more than a year.

“U.K. and euro-zone monetary policy looks to be heading the same way for a period of time,” said Vosa, a former Bank of England economist. “They are now dependent on the evolution of real economic data as they try to distance their own domestic bond and interest rate markets from those of the U.S.”

http://business.financialpost.com/2013/07/05/carney-and-draghi-declare-monetary-independence-from-rising-u-s-rates/