Looks like the United Conservative Party (UCP)’s scheme to encourage civic political parties and allow big corporate money to make it easier to elect ideologically simpatico mayors and councillors in Alberta’s big cities was a bust in Edmonton and not much better in Calgary.
At any rate, while the ridiculous manual vote count the UCP insisted on plodded onward on election night, neither of the UCP’s favoured candidates in Monday’s province-wide municipal elections made it into the mayor’s offices of the province’s two biggest cities.
Indeed, unofficial council results in Edmonton also suggest independent candidates, most with progressive sympathies, beat those who ran under the banners of conservative leaning civic parties in eight of the city’s 12 wards.
“We saw a very clear rejection of party politics in Edmonton,” the city’s low-key mayor-elect, Andrew Knack, observed accurately after it became clear he’d defeated Better Edmonton civic party standard-bearer Tim Cartmell and 11 other mayoral candidates.
Cartmell conceded to Knack Tuesday afternoon, although four Better Edmonton council candidates were listed as winners in the city’s unofficial results.
Knack, a former three-term city councillor who until departing Mayor Amarjeet Sohi made it clear he was leaving civic politics had been contemplating quitting himself, can be expected to lead the city competently without a lot of drama. He’ll doubtless respond diplomatically if the UCP tries to goad him into a confrontation. Cartmell had served two terms on council.
In Calgary, meanwhile, the MAGA-adjacent operators of pro-UCP bots and trolls who spent the past four years relentlessly attacking Mayor Jyoti Gondek, succeeded in blocking her re-election bid. But instead of their favoured candidate, Sonya Sharp of the Communities First civic party, Calgarians appear to have elected former councillor and former mayoral candidate Jeromy Farkas, who campaigned independently on a more moderate conservative platform.
The vote was tight – 75,123 votes for Farkas to 73,957 for Sharp early Tuesday – so the latter has asked for a recount, as is her right. Assuming that Farkas emerges as the winner when the dust has settled, which is what usually happens with such recounts, I suppose the MAGA crowd will spend the next four years fervently bad-mouthing him too.
With the caveat that I have paid very little attention to Calgary civic politics since I left that city more than a quarter century ago, it seems to me that many of the same lessons about the UCP’s machinations can be drawn from what happened there. The Calgary Herald had some background coverage on the city’s ward races.
Be that as it may, the UCP strategic brain trust’s notion that the route to re-election runs through the province’s two biggest municipalities’ City Halls is dead on arrival. Fortunately for them, though, the Opposition NDP appears to be still dozing at the switch. Naturally, many Albertans are hoping they will awaken when the Legislature resumes sitting on Thursday.
The goal of the UCP’s legislation last year opening Edmonton’s and Calgary’s election races to political parties and big corporate money was clearly to help get rid of progressive councillors and mayors who have been a thorn in Premier Danielle Smith’s side.
Then municipal affairs minister Ric McIver said in 2024 that the government’s intent for the legislation was “to increase accountability, transparency, and public trust in local elections.” Ironically, this may have just happened – only not in the way the UCP intended.
For his part, McIver is now Speaker of the Legislative Assembly, so he can probably dodge any smart-alecky questions about what he had to say back then.
As an aside, I was delighted to see that progressive activist and skilled rabble-rouser Michael Janz, a stone in the shoes of the UCP government and its allies in the capital city, absolutely crushed all opponents with 58.16 per cent of the vote.
Janz accumulated more votes in his single ward than all but four of the candidates for mayor did in the entire city – and that included former Conservative MP Rahim Jaffer, to whom the media devoted undue attention, presumably thanks to his insignificant history in federal politics.
The vote has been taking forever to count as a result of the provincial requirement that electronic tabulation technology no longer be allowed in municipal elections. This was apparently done as a sop to the governing party’s influential MAGA base, which apparently doesn’t understand the difference between vote counting software and U.S.-style voting machines.
New identification requirements in Edmonton and Calgary also resulted in long delays for voters, likely contributing to the low voter turnout throughout the province Monday, as was doubtless intended by the introduction of the blizzard of UCP red tape.
Municipal Affairs Minister Dan Williams had the cheek to blame the municipalities for the long lineups. There were still no election results available from several Alberta cities and towns, including St. Albert, when your blogger put this post to bed last night.
NOTE: This is a proverbial hot take. The author reserves the right to change his mind about literally every conclusion drawn here with no more shame than you’d expect from a UCP cabinet minister and no apology whatsoever. DJC
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