Western Standard - FILDEBRANDT： The unions bought city hall

00:00:00.040 I'm Derek Fildebrandt, publisher of the Western Standard. Jodi Gondak is Calgary's new mayor-elect.

00:00:12.920 She largely represents a continuation of Nahid Nenshi's purple reign that has led the city's

00:00:17.840 council and government since 2010, although there are hopeful signs that personality-wise,

00:00:22.880 she has less of the outgoing mayor's Jupiter-size ego and petulance. Gondak's victory means not

00:00:29.440 only that Jeremy Farkas will not be the mayor, but that he will no longer continue in his role as the

00:00:34.800 unofficial leader of the opposition. The size of the Conservative bloc on council may end up

00:00:40.960 relatively similar to its pre-election makeup, but its influence will be much diminished.

00:00:46.640 In addition to Farkas, the Conservative bloc has lost Joe Meglioca, and while Sean Chu has won the

00:00:52.400 day, his scandal involving a minor in 1997 continues to deepen. CTV is reporting salacious new details,

00:00:59.360 that could make his continuation in that position untenable. Chu denied the allegations in an

00:01:07.200 exclusive interview with the Western Standard, but more evidence will be needed to be produced

00:01:12.080 one way or another to determine who's really telling the truth. The jury is still very much out on this

00:01:17.440 one. Adding to the Conservative bloc, however, is Terry Wong, who replaced one of the most stridently

00:01:23.840 leftist members of the council, Drew Farrell, as well as Dan McLean, who unseated Weathervane incumbent

00:01:29.680 Diane Cully Urquhart. Centre-right former councillor André Chauveau also returns to council,

00:01:35.760 as does the swing vote Peter de Maung, who was the only incumbent with no union candidate endorsed

00:01:42.640 against him. Taken together, the Union bloc, the Conservative bloc, will likely be made up of four

00:01:49.440 councillors, if Chu can hang on. If they can sway De Maung, they can make up five votes on the council,

00:01:55.520 soaking wet, well short of the eight votes needed to win a majority on any given issue.

00:02:01.440 The Union super PAC, Calgary's future, swept the table. Their candidates took the Mayor's chair,

00:02:07.840 eight council seats, although their leftist bloc will likely be joined by non-union endorsed Richard

00:02:13.520 Poopmans. That brings the Union progressive bloc to ten votes on the city council. Ten union 0.85

00:02:20.480 progressives, four Conservatives, and one swing. It's a clean sweep that puts Calgary on a course

00:02:27.520 for a more interventionist government for at least the next four years, and with Calgary's tendency to

00:02:32.960 re-elect municipal incumbents at perpetuity, potentially much longer. Could Jeremy Farkas have won?

00:02:39.360 It's always an error to add up the votes of the also-ran candidates and just add their total to

00:02:47.440 the runner-up as if a party or a candidate has any kind of ownership over them. But let's just do it

00:02:53.280 for the sake of hypotheticals anyway, shouldn't we? Since well before the official campaign period

00:02:59.840 kicked off, Jeremy Farkas was the clear Conservative standard bearer for the Mayor's chair. He led the

00:03:05.200 Conservative bloc on council, sometimes as a vote of just one on some of the more controversial issues.

00:03:10.800 He led every single poll in the race until the very end, and other center-right-ish candidates

00:03:16.640 never came close to catching him. On election night, he polled 30% of the vote to Gondek's 45%.

00:03:23.680 Jeff Davison ran the mold of a business Conservative, promising a more enterprise-friendly environment,

00:03:29.040 but to not go to war with the city's administration. The card-carrying Conservative polled a respectable 13%

00:03:35.040 on election night. Similarly, Bradfield ran a semi-conservative, business-friendly campaign,

00:03:42.000 pulling down 5% of the vote. Together, the 18% of the vote earned by these two candidates could

00:03:48.320 theoretically have put Farkas over the top. Of course, that's bad math. Just that the Federal Tories have

00:03:54.320 no right to the votes of PPC voters, or the Federal Liberals have no right to the votes of the NDP or

00:04:00.480 Greens. Farkas has no inherent right to the votes of Davidson and Field. The only people with a right

00:04:05.280 to someone's vote are voters themselves. But it is worth asking why there were three credible

00:04:11.520 center-to-right candidates on the ballot, but only one credible left progressive. In the absence of a

00:04:17.600 municipal party system, big-money PACs have filled the void, effectively picking candidates with their

00:04:23.440 war chest. On the union progressive side, Calgary's future had an incredible $1.7 million dollars to

00:04:30.240 spend on its slate, effectively clearing the field of nuisance progressives for the clear front runners

00:04:36.400 to emerge for the mayor's chair. And in most wards, progressives like former Federal Liberal

00:04:43.120 Cabinet Minister Kent Hare saw the writing on the wall soon after he declared. This effectively

00:04:48.000 consolidated the vote behind a single candidate, allowing them to stand out from the PAC in 10 of

00:04:53.520 the 14 races win. The conservative side of the fight was much less clean cut. There was no single

00:05:01.120 dominating super PAC able to effectively bankroll a slate of candidates and clear the field. Until very

00:05:08.320 late in the game, big business and conservative establishment were hesitant to get behind Farkas.

00:05:14.480 He may have been a conservative, but he was not their man. Farkas was a libertarian who hailed from

00:05:19.680 the old Wild Rose Party and a protege of Preston Manning. He opposed major corporate welfare projects

00:05:24.720 that are often supported by much of the bigger business community. They tended to prefer more

00:05:30.320 moderate conservatives, less likely to throw a hand grenade into the city council chamber. But Farkas had

00:05:36.480 built up enough public profile and locked in a solid base of support before the conservative

00:05:41.520 establishment could anoint their own candidate. As reported in a Western Standard exclusive one year

00:05:47.280 ago, a party insider told us that Alberta Premier Jason Kenney himself was on the hunt for a more

00:05:52.640 amenable conservative mayoral candidate whose name was not Jeremy Farkas. The usual Tory establishment

00:05:59.520 voices pleading for unity and to not split the vote were seldom to be heard beseeching Davidson and

00:06:06.240 Field to get behind Farkas. The outsized role of union money in the campaign is curious. Not so much

00:06:13.040 because they tried and succeeded in buying a majority on council to sign their contracts,

00:06:18.560 but because it was allowed to happen at all. The Alberta UCP government introduced stiff new

00:06:23.920 legislation curtailing the ability of unions to collect money from their members for use in political

00:06:29.120 purposes without their direct consent. The legislation would require unions to obtain the sign-off

00:06:35.200 of individual union members to opt into using their dues for political activity rather than just

00:06:40.160 spending it without their consent as has historically been the case. Most curiously,

00:06:45.840 Kenney never proclaimed the legislation into law even though it has long passed through all stages of

00:06:51.440 the legislative assembly. The union bosses took notice and raised more money than ever for their

00:06:58.080 slate of candidates. In the place of political parties running our civic elections, Calgarians have woken up

00:07:04.400 to a council bought and paid for by government unions. Who is to blame is a debate that is going to need to be

00:07:12.400 a 편중ic-evil people as well towards the right of the administration. He had an eldest.

Western Standard - October 20, 2021

FILDEBRANDT： The unions bought city hall

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