Calgary Mayoral Election – Part 2 : Brent's Basement

A bit of news today, the Calgary Hearld is reporting that Greg Berdette has dropped out of the race, and Amanda Liu has joined in. Also, some updates from the Wikipedia article, Alnoor Kassam and Paul Hughes have both withdrawn today and are both endorsing Barb Higgins. So that’s three people off the list and one new one added.

So, let’s start today with newcomer Amanda Liu:

Amanda Liu

It seems that all the information we have on Amanda is in the Calgary Hearld article, her big issues are the economy and ensuring that immigrants better understand the laws of Canada. She doesn’t really have any other plans at this point. Good luck Amanda, but you’re off my list.

Bonnie Devine

Jumping straight to Bonnie’s website, her motto is “People before Profit”. Nice sentiment. She wants to get rid of Public Transit Fares, public school fares, create low income housing, increase funding for subsidized housing, education and food banks. Increase the number of teachers, nurses and doctors and bring in rent control among other things. Unfortunately she doesn’t explain how this is all going to get paid for. Her plateform seems to be based on reducing sources of income for the city while spending more. Next!

Wayne Stewart

From looking at his website, Wayne seems to have a fairly impressive background and education although after digging around for about ten minutes I wasn’t able to easily find a concise description of his platform, he’s got a bulleted list of points but no real details behind them. He does have links to several news articles related to his campaign, so I’ll have to spend some time reading through those a little later. He stays on the list for now.

Kent Hehr

I have to say, Kent definitely has one of the more attractively designed websites that I’ve seen (http://kenthehr.ca) and it looks like he is just launching his ad campaign today. So far there isn’t alot of information on his platform, but he does have one quote that mentions a couple of the issues that I’m interested in:

“Now is NOT the time to talk about cutting services and halting plans for much needed infrastructure,” says Hehr. “We need to come together as a community and not lose sight of the long term benefits of projects like the airport tunnel and facilities like public libraries.”

Kent is the MLA for Calgary-Buffalo and is a lawyer. He’s got an interesting background and looks like he has some good ideas. Not a front runner but I’ll be going back for a better look at his site and his view on some of the other issues.

Oscar Fech

I couldn’t find any information on Oscar Fech’s campaign other than the original article in the Calgary Hearld announcing he was running, and the only thing that article said was that he interrupted a debate to declare he was running, as he did in 2001 and 2004 and:

Fech has also been a civic agitator of sorts, making a habit of speaking at almost every public hearing that city council holds. Some of his antics prompted city hall security to ban him for a year, and he’s only recently been able to attend meetings again.

Bye bye Oscar.

The rest of the candidates are either Alderman or people I know enough about that I’ll treat them as serious contenders. So, my list of candidates to look into further now consists of :