By most accounts the 2023 election will be determined by who can win the most seats in Calgary. In 2019 the UCP won 23 of the city’s 26 seats. The NDP got three, down from the 15 they won in 2015. Regaining those seats won’t be easy. In nine of the last 10 provincial elections, Calgary gave conservative parties a majority of the city’s seats. Now, however, in key suburban battleground ridings, polls have the NDP and the UCP virtually tied.
Calgary-Varsity: The future of healthcare is on the ballot
Main candidates in 2023:
– UCP: Jason Copping is Alberta’s Minister of Health and formerly the minister of labour and immigration.
– Alberta Party: Angela Grace is a psychologist and an advocate against the UCP changes to the K-6 curriculum.
– NDP: Dr. Luanne Metz is a professor and the former head of neurology at the Hotchkiss Brain Institute at the University of Calgary.
The Calgary Cancer Centre—approved in 2017—will finally open in 2024.
Calgary-Varsity is a healthcare hub, containing the Alberta Children’s Hospital, the Foothills Hospital and the new Calgary Cancer Centre. Since it was first contested in 1993, the riding has variously been won by the Progressive Conservatives, the Liberals, the NDP and the UCP. In 2019 the race was tight, with the UCP’s Jason Copping edging out the NDP’s Anne McGrath by less than a 3 per cent margin (about 600 votes). Copping is now the Minister of Health. Compared to his combative predecessor, Tyler Shandro, Copping has projected an air of relative competence that has kept him in the role through the transition from premier Jason Kenney to premier Danielle Smith. Still, as health minister Copping has repeatedly undermined public healthcare, from expanding private lab services to contracting out thousands of orthopedic surgeries to a private for-profit company.
Dr. Luanne Metz—a professor of neurology at the U of C and a recipient of the Alberta Medal of Distinguished Service (which recognizes physicians who have made an outstanding personal contribution to the medical profession and to all Albertans)—is the NDP candidate in the riding.
She secured the nomination early, in summer of 2021. “As a physician and a researcher, I decided to enter politics because I knew that the increasing privatization of healthcare by the UCP would not improve outcomes for patients,” she announced. “Privatization will not lead to better results. Instead, it will draw resources away from the public system, eroding it further. This has been shown time and again in study after study. I’m here for public policy that is based on evidence, not ideology.”
Calgary-North: Suburban battleground
Main candidates in 2023:
– NDP: Rajesh Angral is the CEO, producer and host of Sabrang Radio and the president of the Punjabi Council of Commerce in Calgary.
– UCP: Muhammad Yaseen is the Parliamentary Secretary of Community Outreach, previously associate minister of immigration and multiculturalism.
With many new communities and lots of space for more development at the northern end of the city, Calgary-North has much in common with neighbouring suburban constituencies such as Calgary-Foothills, to the west, and Calgary-North East. As with those ridings, Calgary-North has a higher median household income than the provincial average ($116,612 vs. $93,931) and a higher percentage of people with post-secondary education (73.4 per cent vs. 63.9 per cent). Also similar to those constituencies, Calgary-North has a large visible minority population (62.3 per cent vs. 23.5 per cent for Alberta), and polls project both the UCP and the NDP could win here. The incumbent Muhammad Yaseen, an engineer before running for office in 2019, has had a relatively low profile in the UCP government, and was left out of both Jason Kenney’s and Danielle Smith’s cabinets. In contrast, at least locally, NDP candidate Rajesh Angral has a prominent voice in Calgary-North as a radio host and community organizer of multicultural and sport events such as Culturefest, Vaisakhi Mela and Calgary cricket tournaments. He won a contested NDP nomination race over two other candidates.
Calgary-Glenmore: A sunny new energy economy?
Main candidates in 2023:
– NDP: Nagwan Al-Guneid is director of Business Renewables Centre Canada.
– UCP: Whitney Issik is the incumbent MLA.
– Green: Steven Maffioli is a retail specialist with Freedom Mobile.
NDP candidates Druh Farrell and Nagwan Al-Guneid with Rachel Notley and current MLAs.
Calgary–Glenmore has been a litmus test for Alberta politics.
In 2009 the Wildrose won a by-election here, signalling the party’s rise. In 2015 the NDP won the riding by six votes, highlighting the narrow margin by which they won the provincial election. In 2019 conservative activist Whitney Issik won here for the UCP with 55.6 per cent of the vote, decrying “the decline of the oil and gas business” and the “out-of-work engineers who are in our constituency now.”
To run against Issik in 2023 the NDP recruited Nagwan Al-Guneid, the director of Business Renewables Centre Canada—a non-profit that supports the growth of industrial scale wind and solar energy development. “We’ve been door-knocking a lot, and every third door is either a geologist, a geophysicist or an oil and gas engineer,” says Al-Guneid. “I want to help them to find a home with Alberta’s NDP.”
