With a steady buzz suggesting Premier Danielle Smith may call an early provincial election in 2026, a path to victory runs through Alberta’s city halls, particularly Edmonton’s.
Ms. Smith has made no secret of her lack of enthusiasm for Alberta’s municipal governments – especially the ones in Alberta’s two biggest cities that have a habit of electing progressive councillors and even progressive mayors.
The goal of her United Conservative Party Government’s legislation opening Edmonton’s and Calgary’s election races to political parties and big corporate money was clearly to help her get rid of progressive councillors and mayors who have been a thorn in her side.
UCP-friendly parties running in the two largest cities in the Oct. 20 municipal elections will also allow her to collect useful voter information in both cities that along with the upcoming electoral boundary redrawing the UCP hopes will put more seats into play in the next provincial election.
Obviously, having Conservative-leaning mayors and councils in Edmonton and Calgary would reduce the risk to the UCP of having popular local politicians holding their provincial counterparts accountable for austerity, the government’s dismantling of public health care, and other controversial policies that heavily impact municipalities.
With just three months until the province-wide municipal elections, council campaigns in Calgary and Edmonton are already wrestling with the UCP experiment with political parties and the wave of cash it has unleashed.
With this in mind, here’s a quick primer on what to watch for in Edmonton’s civic election this fall.
The parties
So far, all progressive candidates in Alberta’s capital city have all chosen to run as independents.
Two parties have formed, though, both with ties to the UCP.
There’s the Principled Accountable Coalition for Edmonton, or PACE. Well, I couldn’t have made that moniker up! But PACE makes up for what it lacks in a name by being the first party out the gate in Edmonton.
Led by former Progressive Conservative MLA and Reform Party candidate Doug Main, one of the municipal party’s stated goals is to elect UCP MLAs in Edmonton. A recent “Rally for Edmonton” attracted about 100 people to a downtown hotel and PACE has a candidate in each of the city’s 12 wards. So far, though, PACE has neither named nor endorsed a candidate for mayor.
Then there’s Better Edmonton – mockingly known as the Tim Cartmell Party by its detractors. It’s basically a project to support the mayoral ambitions of Mr. Cartmell, first elected to council in 2017 in the ward now known as Ward pihêsiwin.
In addition to Mr. Cartmell, Better Edmonton has recruited a dozen “Timbits,” a term coined by Edmonton social media commentator Troy Pavlek, to run in the city’s wards.
Better Edmonton hopes to position itself as the “progressive conservative” option. Compared to PACE, Better Edmonton candidates include former Conservative federal and provincial nomination candidates and prominent conservative donors. While recent news stories hint at division in the ranks, there’s still plenty of time to replace any Timbits that fall out of the box.
Big money
Edmonton Mayor Amarjeet Sohi, who is not seeking re-election this fall, raised $684,811 in the 2021 municipal election. According to his 2024 disclosures, one candidate for mayor, Mr. Cartmell, had already raised $464,450 last year.
Public Information Alberta called on the province “to reduce spending and donation limits, and require transparency from Political Action Committees prior to the October municipal election.”
PIA objects to corporate and union donations in politics, and calls for spending limits and increased disclosure, said the organization’s democracy task force chair, University of Calgary Professor Hans Smits.
However, despite the UCP’s changes to municipal election financing legislation, Political Action Committees have been slow to form. The pro-UCP and pro-police Edmonton Forward project has run social media advertisements attacking Mr. Sohi and three-term councillor Andrew Knack. The union-backed Working Families Edmonton PAC has shown some faint signs of life.
Candidates for mayor
In Edmonton, most political watchers had expected Mr. Sohi to seek a second term until he ran in the 2025 federal election and burned that bridge behind him by announcing that win or lose he wouldn’t seek another term as mayor.
Throughout the past four years, a right-wing opposition coalesced around second-term councillor Tim Cartmell. Mr. Cartmell’s team raised almost half a million dollars in 2024.
With Mr. Sohi out, candidates have been scrambling to fill the political vacuum his departure created. Former Reform Party MP Rahim Jaffer has thrown his hat in the ring, offering free parking downtown as a come-on.
So far progressives and centrists seem to have coalesced around Mr. Knack, who had previously announced he wouldn’t seek a fourth term on council and was rumored to be hoping to win an NDP nomination for the next provincial election.
As they say, a week is a long time in politics. So, with Nomination Day not until Sept. 22, there are still plenty of opportunities for more candidates to join the race. Indeed, an announcement is expected soon from former two-term councillor Michael Walters, an advocate of involuntary drug addiction treatment.
For those who anticipated this would turn into a Cartmell coronation thanks to his enormous financial advantage, the candidate’s recent “Cartmeltdown” suggests he and his party may not be able to take the heat of a 21st Century political campaign.
Mr. Cartmell’s antics were eviscerated by the usually gentle Postmedia City Hall columnist Keith Gerein for the candidate’s “bizarre and spurious approach” at a public hearing on zoning reforms. After trying to move an illegal motion, Mr. Cartmell skipped the critical vote for a vacation, claiming he wouldn’t be able to be reached. Hey, maybe he’s never heard of wifi!
Council races
All sitting councillors but one are seeking re-election, facing a cluttered field of challengers. As a result, incumbents enter the race with a recognition advantage. Only in Ward sipiwiyiniwak in the city’s southwest, where UCP-friendly Councillor Sarah Hamilton, notorious for the load of F-bombs she dropped during a recent council meeting, is not seeking re-election.
Thanks to the UCP opening the field to political parties, and the decision of progressive candidates to run as independents, it’ll be easy for voters to identify who the conservatives are. Progressive voters unfamiliar with the candidates in their wards should seek out the endorsements of the Working Families Coalition.
School board elections
Except for one race, the seven Catholic School Board seats were acclaimed in the last municipal election. This raises an obvious question: Why do we even have Catholic School Boards?
As for the Edmonton Public School Board, the two-and-a-half-month strike by CUPE educational support staff seems to have mobilized some parents and candidates. UCP-associated right-wing lobby groups for parent of private-school students and home-schooled kids can be expected to run candidates.
Voters seeking to identify progressive candidates can visit Support Our Students Alberta’s Progressive Trustee Hub.
Expect city council candidates, especially incumbents, to make an effort to educate voters that the substantial education taxes rolled into their municipal tax bills that go directly to the provincial government while city councils take the heat. What voters think are education taxes can go to the province’s general revenues and be used to finance almost anything – separatist townhall meetings, abandoned well cleanup subsidies, Turkish “tylenot,” you name it!
Population and demographics
More than 150,000 people have moved to Edmonton in the past four years. That’s almost as many as voted for Mr. Sohi and runner up Mike Nickel in 2021. However, it’s not clear what if anything this wave of growth will mean on Oct. 20.
Half of the city’s population is under 40, so this could be an opportunity for progressives to get out the vote. After all, many young Edmontonians depend on public transit and potentially could benefit for the current council’s housing policies. Or, if the tendency of young voters to turn right seen in the recent Canadian federal election holds, they could go the other way.
Edmonton is not New York, and there is no charismatic version of Zohran Mamdani running for mayor. Pity.
I don’t feel Edmonton was the main target of the UCP’s party favouring municipal election rule changes. That would be the other major Alberta city to the south. However, Edmonton could be, as they say, collateral damage.
First of all, is Doug Main really still around? Apparently he is! However, Cartmell will be the one to bring the TCP to the UCP, or not, in Edmonton. Also still around is former MP Jaffer who can run as a populist outsider with business experience. He could be the dark horse candidate.
Knack may also be pleasant and competent enough to win.
I don’t know if TCP manages to pull it off, the UCP should read too much into it, but they probably will. However Cartmell is now stuck in a twilight zoning controversy of his own making, after speaking out but not managing to actially vote on changes to the zoning rules. I feel he decided it was in his political interest to prolong the controversy and his holiday was just a convenient excuse to this end.
With no incumbent Mayor running, and not much enthusiasm for any incumbent councilors it still seems like a fairly open field now.
You should try your hand at dystopian fiction, Dave.
Jim: I have. Everyone who read my unpublished, unpublishable novel said, “Don’t give up your day job.” DJC
Unpopular topic, I know, but I’d like more discussion about school board trustee candidates.
With at least a couple of candidates for city council in Edmonton and Calgary advocating for more parental ‘choice’ in schooling and in early childhood learning, I wonder if we’re not looking at the early stages of a phase-out of elected public school boards.
Possible typo alert: you wrote,
‘Public Action Alberta called on the province “to reduce spending and donation limits, and require transparency from Political Action Committees prior to the October municipal election.”…”PIA objects to corporate and union donations in politics, and calls for spending limits and increased disclosure”, said the organization’s democracy task force chair, University of Calgary Professor Hans Smits.’
So, is Public Action Alberta a different organization than PIA, which is Public Interest Alberta? Or is this just a typo?
On the more substantive side, I think the more progressive-sided candidates for Edmonton City Council are naive, and shooting themselves in the foot, in what amounts to boycotting the party system: their right-wing adversaries will have undeniable advantages in the October elections due to have the fiscal resources to make more voters aware of them. However, I have no canine in this confrontation, as I do not live in either of the two big cities where this is all going on.
Thanks, Jerry. It was a typo. Too many public action committees on my mind while writing late at night, I guess. It’s been fixed. I agree with you about the naivety of progressive candidates in Edmonton – although it may not be a bad strategy for this one election. But they’d better get their act together after that, or some other, less innocent progressives will. DJC
I would say the UCP’s path to victory is the Alberta electorate. I know I keep beating this drum, and it’s probably getting tiresome, but:
The UCP are ruthless, utterly unprincipled authoritarians, inspired and I would imagine directed by the US Republican Party. They know how to use the almost unlimited power of a majority government to compromise free elections, and they intend to use every bit of it. It doesn’t help that — to all indications — a sizeable majority of the electorate support them, as they unfailingly have for every election in more than 50 years.
let’s call a spade a spade; what albertans think are education taxes is really the alberta version of an equalization program/scheme for rural albertans.
we should have a referendum on the matter.
I live in an infill neighborhood, you know what’s worse than infill ? No vacancies. Sprawl. Speculative real estate investment, predatory rental companies, like ARH, and Rentex, not to mention boardwalk etc…
Rather than running for mayor Cartmell should announce he’s not seeking re-election at all and just go work for whoever’s paying him.
No other way to put it, but the UCP have created a dictatorship.
PACE is first out of the gate because they’re accepting American money under the new Alberta MAGA let’s-push-municipal-politics-to-the-extreme-right policy that allows them to hide their donors