After 100 posts, Rage looks back at our hits
It's the final days of the 2021 municipal elections across Alberta. Here's what we wrote in this newsletter since February.
Our newsletter was looking at this year’s municipal elections in Alberta before a single candidate had planted a sign in a lawn.
We were here before more than 25 people decided they should run for mayor in Calgary and before the province confirmed it would pile a referendum question or two onto this October’s municipal ballots. We were here before the snap federal election, before the fourth wave of the pandemic needlessly took further lives, and before Premier Jason Kenney’s corresponding freefall in popularity shifted the long-promised referendum question on equalization into a potential referendum on Kenney’s leadership.
So, over eight months and 100 posts, we’ve been here writing about a lot of things along the way. Some stories have genuinely surprised me. Co-editor Danielle Paradis looked at the intricacies of door-knocking, engaging the disability community during elections, municipal engagement with Indigenous land, progressives battling other progressives in Edmonton and also wrote profiles on most front-running mayoral candidates in Edmonton among other things.
My own faves were helping define frustrations around munis paying for infrastructure but often having little say in if it gets built (see delays on the Green Line), examining the under-reported consequences of the ongoing provincial viability review for several municipalities, the many different angles of how the province can download onto municipalities without political consequence, and of course that referendum.
This feels like the right time to celebrate our work. Here are some of our greatest hits.
February
“… this October was already going to be a vital election to decide where Alberta goes next. But the UCP has raised the stakes. The government seems to want to influence these elections. It has opened up campaign funding and political action campaign rules to invite much bigger, darker money into the municipal races in 2021 through new legislation that weakens restrictions on individuals donating to campaigns as well as rules that don’t require PACs to disclose their backers if they spend less than $350,000.”
Read it here.
“So in summation the next municipal election is shaping up to be the battle of Alberta. School boards face more polemics than ever before, cities are unhappy about the changes to election laws that allow more partisan dollars to flow in to candidates, reduced transparency for who is funding those campaigns, and the virtue signalling at play with the national referendums.”
Read it here.
March
“While many parts of life that affect Albertans are the purview of the provincial government, such as economic diversity or the construction codes that regulate how a building must accommodate people, there are many municipal policies that can have unintended consequences for people with disabilities and others who rely on certain services, like transit, to get around.”
Read it here.
“… the Village of Cereal’s viability report makes for interesting reading. The report notes stakeholders at a public meeting in January 2020 told Municipal Affairs officials that, “The sense of community is important to residents,” “Residents do not want to lose services, such as the library, water distribution, snow clearing, garbage pick-up, or the community hall,” and “Having decisions made locally is important.” They also noted, the report says, that “Property taxes are high.”
If Cereal amalgamates into a hamlet of a nearby municipality, the report notes the town’s CJ Peacock Centre, its community hall, and its arena and curling rink would all be sold.
Oh, and goodbye to the Cereal library.”
Read it here.
April
“The discussion about policing and budgets in Edmonton has been predictably full of emotion and reaction. Suggestions of racism still spark automatic defensiveness in many government forums in Canada. Edmonton is no different. Are transit fares racist? Isn’t racism about intent? How can a system be racist? Any use of that word is demeaning to police. Many who answered these questions said they expected them.
But … at its roots the discussion is about that word — safety. There are several version of it. And these differing versions could inform the coming 2021 municipal election in this city. “
Read it here.
May
“Yet for apartment-dwellers, this means little has probably changed. “As a person who lives in a condo, no one ever knocks on my door,” Knack says. “The way I understand the rules is that only during the election period are you officially allowed access to a building.” Someone must also arrange with a building manager ahead of time so that they can get access.
To Rage Against the Municipal, this would seem to leave large swaths of people out of the conversation. Perhaps COVID-19 will give candidates innovative ideas for how to reach this neglected group of voters in the future.”
Read it here.
“What we’ve seen in this battle with the province,” Binks says, referring to the latest delay from the province to build the long-discussed Green Line, “is that the city is paying the most into the pot but their viewpoints on how to build this are being dismissed.”
This is a classic pay-for-say failure, and one that is all too common in Canada thanks to the vague place municipalities have in our Constitution and the extreme power provinces yield in dealing with them.”
Read it here.
June
“If there’s a piece of advice I would give to a municipality looking to engage in this work,” says Ryan McMahon, comedian, writer and podcaster, “it would be to be kind, to be gentle and be humble. Look around. I can almost guarantee you are on Indigenous territory.”
Read it here.
“Jeff Davison does not think Calgary should engage in politics when it comes to plebiscites. “The constant political grandstanding has got to stop,” Davison, who’s now running for mayor in Calgary, says in a quick chat with Rage. “We tend to nag one another and it’s just not productive.”
…
In isolation this is true. But when put into context, is it? The province and its biggest cities did sit down and discuss a fairer deal. We called these deals the big-city charters, and they saw at least a half step taken toward what modern cities need — predictable revenues and the ability to keep up with growth. These the UCP all but destroyed as one of its first policy decisions.”
Read it here.
July
“Warwick says there’s little he can do to explain the download in a way that people care about, and that this is the darkly brilliant part of the province’s strategy. “It comes down to who gets the blame,” he says, in an interview with Rage. “We have to raise taxes to offset [the lost revenues]. Now the residents can come to me and say ‘Why did our taxes go up?’ You can explain but they don’t care.”
Read it here.
“Edmonton is in the middle of a heatwave when we speak. I ask whether climate change came up in the conversations Oshry’s been having. “It has not been at the forefront for the people we have been talking to. I look at it this way: municipal governments have a mandate of what municipal governments can do, and the City of Edmonton is not going to solve the world’s environmental challenges. So why are we talking about it ad naseum?”
Read it here.
August
“You hear it often that incumbents have an advantage in municipal politics. But how much of an advantage? Well, according to one research paper published by Cambridge University Press, “the rate of municipal incumbent re-election in [Canada] is regularly above 90 per cent.”
Read it here.
“This is a weird one. Coun. Nickel issued a travel advisory as a way to draw attention to concerns about crime in the core. When has a city councillor issued a travel advisory before? Especially while he has thrown his hat in the ring to run the city. We have questions. The main one is: Why did he make women the focus of the tweet, without mentioning that a lot of attacks that have made the news have been racialized women wearing hijabs? And what is the city going to do to combat racist hatred?
Notice also the central stat on animal abuse, and at the bottom of the graphic, and he also references that he’s using both citywide and downtown trends.”
Read it here.
September
“Kaur says even progressive groups and organizations that tout themselves as progressive or intersectional still have barriers and in-groups. “I consider it white supremacy in organizing across whatever political field. I feel like progressives tend to believe that they are the perpetual underdog and if you call us out, you are ruining the cause.”
Read it here.
“While some suggest talk among political strategists is that a successful campaign for mayor in 2021 will cost more than $1 million, others questioned that figure. For one, they say, the COVID-19 pandemic and economic downturn has changed the fundraising reality for municipal politicians. For another, they note, the emergence of the federal election at the same time as the municipal election may have unexpected consequences for fundraising. And for another, they say, the new rules have some interesting outcomes for the fundraising landscape.”
Read it here.
October
“Bonnie Hilford knew that Lethbridge couldn’t afford a repeat. “I could not bear another 27 percent voter turnout, as we had in 2017,” she says, over email So, Hilford has decided to do something. She’s the city clerk and returning officer in Lethbridge, a job that ordinarily sees her work behind the scenes to help people engage with their city government. But as this year’s election drew closer, Hilford reflected. Voter turnout was abysmal in 2017 and that suggested engagement was, too. She and her three-person team see their jobs as engaging people with municipal government and specifically elections. So, she pitched an idea: city-produced, two-minute long candidate videos. And it’s a hit.”
Read it here.
Honourable Mentions
We’re also proud of the following work:
The Bulletin — June 3: There's No Flowchart for Truth and Healing on Indigenous Land
5 Wild Ideas to Save Alberta's Cities
Why The Referendum On Alberta's Municipal Ballots Is All Conservatives Can Think About
Is Calgary Really a Bunch of PACs in a Trench Coat?
'It’s disrespectful when a higher government chooses not to make tough choices'
The Main — June 8: How Can City Hall Stop Overdoses?