CALGARY—Mayor Naheed Nenshi remains hopeful the city will hold a plebiscite this fall to gauge whether Calgarians support a bid to host the 2026 Olympic Games.

Council is slated to debate the issue and public engagement plans at Monday’s meeting, a week after an attempt to abandon a bid failed in a 9-6 vote.

“If council endorses a plebiscite, we can start doing some of the backroom work on it to ensure the processes and the procedures are in place,” Nenshi told reporters Thursday. “Then we will have a recommendation for a plebiscite date come to council ... later this spring.”

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While council may support a non-binding plebiscite, the city will face a number of logistical hurdles.

All three orders of government must agree on the timing of a plebiscite. The city’s chief returning officer, Laura Kennedy, has recommended a six-month timeline, placing the vote sometime in October — at the earliest.

Once a date is set, city officials must then book voting locations, recruit more than 3,000 volunteers, and hire a consultant to carefully craft the wording of the question and “for and against” explanations.

In a recent report, Kennedy laid out several potential pitfalls, including: limited outreach due to the short time frame and an ambiguous ballot question that could be used by campaigns and could result in a lower voter turnout.

The Canadian Taxpayers Federation (CTF) intends to run a “very vocal” campaign urging Calgarians to vote “no.” It is already recruiting volunteers, assembling a campaign team, and launched a website NoOlympicBid.ca.

“There’s a lot of problems right now with the whole idea of Calgary putting in a bid,” said Colin Craig, Alberta director of the CTF. “The provincial government’s debt is increasing over $1 million an hour. The federal government’s debt is going up more than $2 million an hour.

“On top of that, we’d probably see property taxes go up,” he added. “Then there’s a whole bunch of problems around the IOC and a repeated history of corruption.”

Further, the entire process could be derailed long before a plebiscite is held.

Council could pull the plug in June after it receives a report providing more details on the cost to host the Games. Calgary may not make the short list when the International Olympic Committee announces candidate cities in October.

And a key question remains unanswered: Who is going to foot the $2-million bill?

While the provincial and federal governments contributed to the creation of a $30-million Bid Corporation, the Alberta government won’t cough up additional funding unless the city holds a plebiscite.

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A spokesperson for Culture and Tourism Minister Ricardo Miranda told StarMetro the province would work with the city and federal government on how the cost would be covered if council supports a plebiscite.

Councillor Sean Chu said the city could dip into its fiscal stability reserve or use the $2 million in unspent funding previously allocated to the Bid Exploration Committee to pay for the plebiscite.

“In comparison to $4.6 billion (the estimated Olympic price tag), $2 million is actually prudent to get the consensus of people,” he said.

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