BRAID: POWERFUL FORCES CLASH

Calgary’s voting system overwhelmed by turnout spurred on by mayoral race

On an election day without precedent, as voters jammed the polls and stations ran out of ballots, a stray moose came to symbolize the whole mess.

There it was, a moose with a limp, relaxing in a handicap parking spot. It kept the city’s home voting service from getting to one couple for at least 45 minutes. You could not make this up.

This day stressed the city elections system mightily and at some points it failed. A great many people gave up and left polling stations without exercising their right to vote.

You can understand why the monumental storming of the ballot box would cause delays. But there is no excuse — absolutely none — for these stations to run out of ballots.

The city’s archaic voting system runs on paper ballots, not computer technology that would make counting much quicker. You’d think a system that still runs on paper would at least provide enough paper.

On the back end, the city’s results website slowly ground itself into digital dust, leaving people with blank screens for 15 minutes at a time.

By the Herald’s press time, there was very little sense of who was winning anything.

Mayor Naheed Nenshi was slightly ahead of challenger Bill Smith. Many polls were still to report.

But everybody knew something huge was going on here. And there seemed to be only two ways this could happen.

First, a massive number of voters were backing Smith to kick out Nenshi.

Second, the very real support for Smith prompted an equally powerful reaction in favour of Nenshi. In that case, the voting escalated into a pair of giant waves colliding in mid-ocean.

The campaign itself wasn’t much better than the city election-day effort. It was fuelled by anger signifying not much of anything about some of the biggest problems Calgary has ever faced.

Nenshi said airily that property taxes will be shielded from increases, using ill-defined sources from “here and there.”

Smith vowed to hold the line on taxes, without saying how that’s possible unless council runs through reserve funds, or cuts services, or both.

Through the whole campaign, nobody watered the real elephant in the room — the 50 per cent loss in property tax revenue from companies in the recessionridden downtown towers.

It’s certain that whomever prevails, the mayor and his council will face a revenue crisis to rival the provincial NDP’s.

Neither candidate would be able to avoid service cuts without raising the very taxes they promise to control. Before long, the winner may be wishing he wasn’t. Promises will have to be broken.

This was the most emotional civic campaign in memory. There was nothing vaguely like it over the past dozen terms.

There’s a strong parallel with the 2015 provincial election, when voters said en masse that they were done with the Progressive Conservatives, and moved to the New Democrats.

A similar mood prevails here. It wouldn’t be a radical step for Calgary voters to revert to a middle-of-the-road conservative mayor after they did the nearly unthinkable by electing a city majority of New Democrats.

During the campaign in 2013, Nenshi told the Herald’s editorial board that Calgarians were profoundly happy with the state of the city.

“I fundamentally believe we’ve got something very special here,” he said.

At that moment, Calgarians were still recovering from the dreadful 2013 flood. Nenshi’s leadership during that crisis was superb. He deserved his popularity.

But Calgary is now in the midst of a different crisis entirely — not a single disastrous event, but a long, grinding loss of jobs and wealth.

Smith’s campaign was shrewdly designed to take advantage of Nenshi’s vulnerability, while presenting him as a calm, solid, reasonable alternative.

Smith avoided detailed involvement in the major issues, from the Flames arena to downtown bicycle paths. When he did step in, to criticize the Green Line, trouble ensued. That was it for controversy.

On bicycle lanes, for instance, Smith wouldn’t take any out, might not put any more in, and would change those that aren’t functioning.

But the goal wasn’t really to change the city. It was to change the mayor.

To accomplish that, Smith had to look moderate and unthreatening. Just a common-sense guy you could turn to.

Nenshi started slow but fought vigorously in the second half of the campaign. By the end, his somewhat eroded base was clearly motivated.

Whatever the result, it was a memorable campaign. Unfortunately, it didn’t begin to solve the city’s problems. Don Braid’s column appears regularly in the Herald dbraid@postmedia.com Twitter: Don Braid