“(Mayor Naheed Nenshi) is worried the city will be ignored”
The result of the election is absolutely a shift toward a more urban PC party. But will they realize it and start acting that way?
NAHEED NENSHI
Mayor Naheed Nenshi says he got the riding counts almost exactly right in the office pool for Monday’s election.
That sounds impressive until he adds: “Except I had the parties in the wrong place.”
The mayor joins the sheepish club of pollsters, pundits and even Wildrose strategists like Cliff Fryers, who was explaining to reporters before Monday’s vote count exactly how his party won the election, and what the PCS did wrong.
City hall was tooling up for life with Wildrose, but Nenshi is hardly alarmed by PC victories in 20 of 25 city ridings.
Calgary has been a PC bastion for decades. Mayors are used to it, although not always thrilled, because the local PC MLAS sometimes think they represent the city better than local politicians do.
Now, though, Nenshi has a special concern. He’s worried the city will be ignored as the PCS focus on winning back local Wildrose ridings.
“The result of the election is absolutely a shift toward a more urban PC party,” he says, “but will they realize it and start acting that way?”
Nenshi says the city has been overlooked for the past six months as the PCS focused on three local ridings they hoped to keep from falling to Wildrose.
He’s talking about Highwood, where Wildrose Leader Danielle Smith ran; Chestermere-rocky View (Ted Morton); and Airdrie (already held by Rob Anderson of Wildrose).
Wildrose won all three. And the riding borders coincide, at least in part, with three municipal districts that refuse to join the Calgary Metropolitan Plan.
Nenshi thinks it’s vitally important to get those three balky districts on board. The only solution, he feels, is for the province to order them in.
“We’ve had a lot of trou- ble over the past several years,” Nenshi says. “They just refuse to sign on.
“My question now is, will the government see it that way, or is it going to work very hard to win back those three ridings?”
Over to former Premier Peter Lougheed, who makes some fascinating points about the larger PC job at hand.
Alberta’s new political map “looks quite a lot like it did after the 1971 election, when all Social Credit had left was ridings south of Calgary,” says Lougheed, who wasn’t referring to Nenshi’s concerns.
“We really had to work hard to win those seats.”
And they did, reducing the once-mighty Social Credit caucus to four ridings in 1975.
Redford will surely agree that recapturing Wildrose seats is a PC priority over the next term.
If that means over-coddling rural ridings that hem Calgary, there could be big trouble with city hall.
As for the election itself, Lougheed says, “I’m delighted with the result.
“It reinforces the PC party so strongly as the government party, and endorses Premier Redford’s visions for the future.”
One reason for the big majority, Lougheed feels, is that PCS who sat on the sidelines for several elections came out and voted.
“What was happening in the last period, from the Klein era to Premier Stelmach, is that people were not going to vote against their PC party so they just stayed away from the polls.
“But here you had a situation where they had a positive view of Premier Redford, and also saw that the party was being threatened.”
And so, another big majority — a familiar blessing that comes with the temptation to dismiss areas where the PCS think they’re safe.
Today that includes Calgary. The mayor isn’t about to explode the way Dave Bronconnier did in 2007 over municipal funding, but he’s watchful.