Vigorous battle for mayor’s chair is welcome

Andre Chabot instils some life in what would otherwise be Nenshi coronation

It was a 1978 Mustang Cobra, a car that could go from zero to 60 faster than our provincial government can blow through a million bucks.

I’d bought it back in the summer of ’ 82 at one of those old-fashioned used car lots up there in Edmonton, a place where the owner could see a sucker coming from so far away, we might as well both have been living in Saskatchewan.

But it was love at first sight — a four-wheeled expression of freedom and power. It had a big, green stripe down the hood and large, coiled cobras on each side panel.

Being rear-wheeled drive with a massive eight-cylinder engine in the front — bigger than a Joe Ceci deficit projection, that sucker was — and with precious little weight in the back, I’d soon come to realize that six years’ experience driving on English roads meant diddly squat when it came to manoeuvring it through the ice and snow of my first Alberta winter.

That day, it was late autumn, so the future frozen misery colleagues gleefully threatened me with was still falling simply as rain as Laurence Decore nipped, kind of sharpish, into the passenger seat to escape the downpour.

“You actually drive this thing?” were his first words. I liked him straight away.

He would go on to become a rare breed, indeed: a toughas-nails, smart, charismatic Albertan patriot who was as incorruptible as an iron rail.

He would have been Alberta’s first Liberal premier for an age, had not Ralph Klein usurped his debt-reduction platform, and then Decore, doing the unthinkable as a male politician, opened his big mouth about abortion.

However, that would be years later, after a long trip down an even longer road.

Back then, Decore had just finished yet another speaking gig before a somewhat skeptical crowd as he tried to do something else unthinkable — beat the sitting mayor in Edmonton’s civic election. Decore managed it as well, and to this day, such a feat — which Klein achieved in Calgary in 1980 — in big-city Alberta politics is as rare as our dapper prime minister being seen out in public with the wrong coloured socks.

Which is why, in the here and now of Calgary, Andre Chabot is to be admired, but also pitied in deciding to throw his hat into the ring to face off against Naheed Nenshi in the race for the mayor’s chair this October.

His chances are of the slim variety, but sometimes, slim is all it takes, and there’s an undercurrent of annoyance bordering on anger in some circles of this city regarding the spending habits of the Nenshi-led council during the last few years, in particular — a time when many folk are struggling to make ends meet.

Chabot, of course, is part of that same council, representing Ward 10, so some of the spendthrift moniker sticks to him, too.

Describing yourself as a fiscal hawk is one thing; having a voting record to be put to the test during a sevenmonth-long campaign is quite another.

But credit to him for taking on Nenshi. It ensures the sort of race that will put the current mayor’s feet to the fire much more than one in which earnest outsiders provide the only challenge.

We can already see it with the mayor’s snide comment about how he’s glad Chabot declared after dithering about doing so for a decade.

It wasn’t that long ago that Nenshi himself was dithering about seeking a third term, and in Chabot’s case, a mayoral campaign means quitting the job he’s done for a dozen years — anyone who didn’t dither before doing so voluntarily in our city right now would be irresponsible, if not downright stupid.

It has all the makings of an old-fashioned political slugging match. So bring it on and let’s rock ’n’ roll. More than ever Calgary needs such a debate.

His chances are of the slim variety, but sometimes, slim is all it takes.