When Jyoti Gondek first began musing about the idea of running for mayor of Calgary, the polling wasn’t exactly encouraging.
In early 2021, a survey of potential mayoral candidates put support for her at just 2 per cent – within the margin of error of zero, recalls her campaign manager, Stephen Carter. A few months later, thanks to some intense work building the rookie councillor’s profile, voter intention numbers crawled all the way up … to seven points.
But by October, when the only poll that mattered took place, Ms. Gondek secured a whopping 45 per cent of the vote, besting her nearest challenger, Jeromy Farkas, by 15 points. Now the city’s first female mayor is sitting on a couch in a spacious meeting room across from her office, trying to articulate what she considers her biggest surprise since taking office.
“It’s the level of polarization among the public,” she says. “There’s polarization over political ideology, over COVID. Everything is so tense. I know you can’t make everyone happy, but it feels like these days you can’t make anyone happy.”
Ms. Gondek is still smarting from a poll that came out last month that put her approval rating at just 38 per cent, an eye-popping seven-point plunge in just five months. There are some likely reasons why.
One of her first moves in office was to declare a climate emergency. It was something she had promised as a candidate, but in an oil-and-gas town, it was viewed as anti-energy heresy. Then a deal to build a new downtown arena and entertainment district collapsed. She was largely tagged (unfairly) for that as well; she blames pundits with pens and lots of subscribers for pushing factually incorrect information she couldn’t counter effectively. She also fronted a wildly unpopular property tax increase of nearly 4 per cent.
A mayor with as little political experience as Ms. Gondek might be rattled by the latest polling feedback. But far from being spooked, she seems determined to see that her agenda isn’t pushed off-track by a timid need to please. To that end, she is preparing to make a bold foray into rebranding her city.
She believes most of the country still thinks of Calgary as a redneck town for oil and gas cowboys, the Stampede and Yee Haw writ large. It’s also likely that most of the country still thinks of Calgary as largely homogeneous demographically (i.e. white). But that is caricature, Ms. Gondek believes, that does not reflect the 2022 version of Calgary – a city that has the third-highest proportion of people of colour in Canada.
“Yesterday, I announced our new poet laureate, Wakefield Brewster, who is from the Black community,” she says. “I was standing behind him wearing a Punjabi outfit, after just proclaiming Sikh heritage month. That’s our city, but that image is not getting out in the world.”
Ms. Gondek inherited many problems from her predecessor, Naheed Nenshi. The oil and gas recession that began in 2014 left 30 per cent of downtown Calgary’s office towers empty. There is now a $1-billion plan to repurpose much of that space, including converting swaths of it for residential use. Unemployment, meanwhile, is still stubbornly high at 8 per cent – the third-highest among the 37 cities across the country measured by Statistics Canada in February. Young people are fleeing, although the extent to which this has reached a crisis point is debatable.
Calgary’s very design works against it. The city was built on an outdated model of the downtown core as a central business district servicing the suburbs. “We didn’t evolve with the times,” she tells me. The city needs to get more people living downtown as well as working. The tech workers the city is trying to attract want to live in the urban core.
She has established an ambitious agenda: reinventing her city – from how it operates to how it’s perceived – to dispel the tired, clichéd stereotype that has existed for too long. And her ability to make headway will depend, at least in part, on co-operation with the province’s United Conservative Party government. During her bid for mayor, Ms. Gondek campaigned as much against the wildly unpopular Jason Kenney as against her main opponent, Mr. Farkas, a conservative and a friend of the Premier. It was a guilt-by-association play, and it worked. But it hasn’t made life since her win easy. Mr. Kenney isn’t going out of his way to help her much.
Ms. Gondek has her hands full trying to push an aggressive, groundbreaking agenda amid tumultuous times that has the public in an angry mood. That could make her the most transformative mayor the city has known in decades – or a spectacular one-term flame-out. Only time will tell.
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