An Interpretation

The Mall and City Hall
by Olive Elliot

The Ghermezian brothers had a dream. They wanted to build a shopping mall like no other in existence and, regardless of opposition from city planners, adjoining residential neighborhoods and other land developers, they were determined to build it on a site where no shopping centre was supposed to be.

As every Edmontonian knows, the Ghermezians succeeded. West Edmonton Mall, the world's largest shopping and entertainment centre and the city's biggest tourist attraction, sprawls impressively along 170th Street. However, in the process of realizing that dream, the Ghermezians created a situation that propelled them and city council into a painful public inquiry that left reputations on all sides tarnished.

It was the early 1970s. As with the rest of oil-rich Alberta, Edmonton was booming. The city was growing at a tremendous rate, with new subdivisions bursting out on all sides. City council, the senior city administration and the planning department, armed with a General Plan, subdivision plans, neighborhood plans and a zoning bylaw, struggled to keep order.

Land developers proliferated. Often, what the developers wanted didn't agree with what city planners wanted. When that happened, the developers -- generally suave well-dressed men with suave well-dressed lawyers who understood how the game was played -- would quietly persuade. If they succeeded, great. If they failed -- well, there would always be another day and another project.

Enter the Ghermezians. The outsiders. Jacob Ghermezian and his family moved from Tehran to Montreal in the 1950s. His four sons, Eskandar, Nader, Raphael and Bahman, worked with their father in his carpet import business. In the 1960s, at the urging of their father, it is said, the brothers began acquiring land in Edmonton. Soon, they moved to the city and plunged into the development business. In the beginning. their developments were comparatively modest. Then, in 1973, came what was initially known as Westgate Shopping Centre.

West Jasper Place, the subdivision west of 170th Street, was expanding rapidly on the basis of the city's land-use plan for the area. This was a time when planners were mesmerized by an idealized concept of community.

Among other things, this assumed that a subdivision could be designed so people would live and shop and perhaps even work within it. Central to the plan was a town centre, which would contain the major shopping facilities for that area. As Edmonton's existing town centres demonstrate, it wasn't a particularly good idea, but the city was committed to it.

The Ghermezians weren't. It was obvious to them that a shopping centre, especially on the scale they envisaged, should be located beside major roads, not tucked in the middle of a residential area. As well, since the land beside 170th Street land had been zoned for residential use, it was cheaper than land designated for commercial development.

And so the Ghermezians set out to persuade city council to rezone their site.

They descended on city council like nothing the council members had encountered before. Volatile, hyperactive and passionately committed to their dream, they wooed the councillors, meeting with them wherever the council members agreed to meet (the wiser politicians confined those meetings to city hall), entertaining them, providing small gifts and favors or an occasional campaign donation and, if it seemed useful, dangling the tantalizing lure of profitable business deals.

In his report, Justice William G. Morrow, who presided at the public inquiry which eventually followed, summed up the situation:

"The Ghermezian brothers, who had become Canadian citizens, showed throughout as very intelligent and astute businessmen. Knowing that they were relatively newcomers in the field of city land development, they became students -- carefully studying all aspects of municipal government, attending council meetings to see how the aldermen performed. It was not long until they had the measure of most of the participants. Armed with this knowledge ... they showed themselves to be aggressive and successful lobbyists -- and smart enough also to know which aldermen would not be affected by their efforts."

In November 1973, city council passed a rezoning bylaw that gave the Ghermezians their shopping mall site.

However, it wasn't yet clear sailing. In December, another developer, Western Realty, launched a court action (ultimately unsuccessful) to have the bylaw set aside. The Ghermezians might have to go through the whole rezoning application again. And even if that didn't happen, they subsequently were to appear frequently before council demanding concessions, land swaps and even financial support. They still needed city council.

On January 12, 1974, there was a fateful meeting between Raphael Ghermezian and Alderman Alex Fallow.

After that meeting, Fallow notified the police that he had been offered $40,000.

The police began an investigation and Fallow's charge was made public. Raphael Ghermezian responded by insisting Fallow had asked for the $40,000, as commission, Ghermezian said, for a failed business deal involving a hotel site in Fort McMurray. City council had a mess on its hands.

It asked Alberta's attorney-general to set up a commission of inquiry (judicial inquiry) based on terms of reference covering every conceivable wrongdoing including whether any council member "unlawfully or improperly has cast unwarranted or improper reflection upon the integrity of other members of city council...." (That was aimed at Alderman Ed Leger, council's self-appointed watchdog.)

The hearings lasted 44 days. There 54 witnesses and 3,966 pages of testimony. At times, Morrow must have felt like Alice in Wonderland as he listened to the gossip, the innuendo, the misunderstandings and the extremely excitable Ghermezian brothers.

In the end, Morrow concluded that Fallow's version of the story was the correct one. He also found several instances of aldermanic conflict of interest -- generally, on matters unrelated to the Ghermezians -- but no serious grounds for disqualification. And it was clear that while he had some sympathy for council members, he regarded some of them to be naive to the point of foolishness.

Phase One of West Edmonton Mall opened in 1981. Other phases followed until the mall became what the Ghermezians have called the Eighth Wonder of the World and some Edmontonians ruefully refer to as The Mall that Ate Edmonton.