Couple of things...
The Red River floodway is built to a capacity of 4000 cm3/s. The bow maxed out at what, 1600 cm3/s? So if building a floodway was a possibility in Cagary, it could be much, much smaller. You could probably get away with something that could carry 400 cm3/s and it could avoid the catastrophe that just happened. That's one tenth the volume of the red river floodway. So... maybe with that in mind you could build a longer (or more complicated) floodway without incurring huge costs.
Second thing... The Red River floodway is built to withstand a 1-700 year flood. So those of you saying "well, it doesn't happen that often in Calgary" or, "makes more sense in Winnipeg, because it floods more often"... You're missing the point.
All that said, maybe it is in fact completely impossible from an engineering and/or land acquisition position. I don't know. But since we're having this debate, don't think about building a copy of the red river floodway in Alberta. Think about a much smaller floodway, and it might seem more possible.
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