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Calgarians Vote for a Bold Future
10-17-2017
Monday October 16th – The city of Calgary headed to the polls with a heated mayoral contest making it an interesting election in Calgary politics.
With all 14 councillor seats up for grabs along with school trustee seats the line ups were huge at most polling stations.
The City of Calgary tweeted @cityofcalgary, “Due to high voter turnout, additional ballots are being sent to all voting stations across the city.”
In 2013 the final voter turnout was 39% and in 2010 it was 53%.
Monday night results saw the most people casting ballots in 40 years of Calgary's history.
The City officials say the voter turnout was 387,506 or 58.1 percent of registered voters. That figure includes the 74,965 advance vote ballots.
As Calgary continues to struggle through a downturn in economy due to low oil prices, Naheed faced the danger of losing his job.
“There were quite a large number of voters in Calgary who were pretty determined to vote for a candidate who was not Nenshi,” said University of Calgary political scientist Jack Lucas. “But Naheed Nenshi still has a strong base of support in this city and clearly people from a wide range of ideological and partisan perspectives are still willing to vote for him.”
His main opponent Bill Smith — a lawyer and former Progressive Conservative party president became Nenshi’s main thorn during this election.
He said in brief remarks to his supporters that he was proud to have raised issues that were important to Calgarians.
Naheed admits that “Clearly there is some division and it's important for us to understand the nature of that division.”
Nenshi won with about (199,122 votes casted) 51.4 per cent of the vote while Smith got 169,367 votes which is about 43.7%. This is a far cry from the 74 per cent support that he saw during the 2013 election.
Smith congratulated Nenshi and acknowledged that the two men had a "divisive battle" over the past few weeks.
"I think we need to put all of that aside and get behind our mayor and continue to press the issues that are important to Calgarians," he said.
Speaking to jubilant campaign supporters, Nenshi said the election had been a hard, sometimes divisive, campaign, but tonight was “a great victory.”
“You’ve given me once again an extraordinary gift and that gift is your trust and I promise you I will never, never break that trust,” said Nenshi.
“This campaign has also showed us that we as a city are not as united as we may have thought. There are many different points of view in how we move forward and the best part of city council is that we get to leave our ideology at the door and we get to roll up our sleeves and get the job done for Calgarians. And we will.”
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