A political legacy is just eight votes away

The 2012 Calgary civic election is now just one week away, and it promises to be more interesting than anyone expected. Coming into campaign season, the prospect of an election without the catalyst of a seriously contested mayoralty had many people predicting a quiet fall, and a turnout on Oct. 21 below 25 per cent. The turnout could still be small, although solid totals at the advance polls so far seem to suggest the final participation total won’t be that bad. But the mayoralty race (how did we start calling it the mayoral race, by the way?) has basically been a fizzle, despite the best efforts of a certain newspaper columnist to draw the mayor onto the partisan battlefield. The result will be the re-election of Naheed Nenshi, as expected, although it wouldn’t be a surprise if his victory margin was surprisingly small. That’s what you get when you let your supporters conclude you are a cinch to be returned, and they can basically stay home and watch TV. Inviting so-called progressive voters to sit this one out may not have serious consequences for the mayor. But it is very likely to make things tough for some incumbent aldermen, who have formed the bedrock of his voting support on council over the past three years. Councillors Macleod, Farrell, Pootmans, Pincott and Carra have reliably supported Nenshi on what he clearly considers the key issues before the city: Planning, growth management and tax equity. The mayor’s real focus, however, has been on communications and representation, rather than governance. While his predecessor, David Bronconnier, made his reputation by getting things done in council (and carefully counting votes for his projects at every single meeting), Nenshi has more or less let council run free, and has concentrated instead on the more visible public assignments his position affords. One example of this is the life-size cardboard images of the mayor, grinning and holding up a borrowing card, which have adorned local branches of the public library for the past couple of years. Thanks to his high-profile approach to his job, Nenshi is widely known, generally appreciated, and considered by most Calgarians to be a symbol of what we want our city to be in the 21st Century. His outstanding work as a communicator during the flood crisis and its aftermath cemented his standing in this regard. In sum, Nenshi has successfully practiced representative politics while in office, and he is pretty much certain to be given the chance to continue in this role after Oct. 21. But his relative disinterest in the mechanics of decision-making on council have given his opponents a real chance to seize control of council in this election. Throughout this campaign, it has been hard to shake the feeling that the mayor and his supporters haven’t been doing enough to ensure that his voting bloc on council survives. His side has basically brought a knife to a gunfight throughout the campaign, a sign perhaps of his and their political inexperience, or their failure to understand the real political stakes at play. Nenshi has issued a general endorsement of Pincott/Farrell et al. But the energy that surrounded his first campaign has clearly been missing. The people who have missed it most are the very ones Nenshi needs to get anything meaningful done in the next four years. While the progressive camp has basically sat this election out, the other side (we’ll dub them the conservatives, for want of a more descriptive term), have been busy raising money, commissioning studies, marshaling the news media and building up the notion that the mayor’s priorities are out of line with those of the electorate, and that it is time for a change. Taking their cue from Bronconnier, who famously pointed out last winter that the real goal for an incumbent mayor in a civic election is to see enough friendly aldermen elected to control council votes, the conservatives have opted to ignore Nenshi and have been working instead to take over council. At this writing, they appear to be poised to achieve their goal. If they do, they will succeed in making Nenshi’s victory a hollow one, and condemn him to four years of presiding over a council that is committed to move in a radically different direction than he himself wants to go. It could even lead to the emergence of a leader on council who could seriously challenge the mayor in the 2017 civic election, assuming Nenshi wants to stay on. Should all this come to pass, Nenshi and his followers may wish they had paid more attention to that eight-vote idea in his first term in office, and during the 2013 campaign.