City Campaigns on the Cusp and the Edmonton Mayoralty Election of 1992

Abstract

Recent municipal elections in Canada's major cities have revealed a keen competition for power increasingly rooted in ideological divisions. These competitions have directly challenged the once comfortable but essentially suffocating mythology of growth-focussed boosterism. It is in the selection of the community's most visible spokesperson, the mayor, that divisions may become clearest. This case study of one such city-wide campaign, that of 1992 in Edmonton, Alberta, focusses on the logistics of shaping competitive ideologies and divergent cultural images to the rough-and-tumble of election politics. The role assumed by the city hall press gallery is assessed. Some explanation is offered as to why contemporary city campaigns are at their most bitter as ideological choice becomes more clearly defined, and as individuals personify issues and ideas rather than alternative brands of boosterism. General municipal elections have historically been run differently from those in the other worlds of Canadian politics. Councillors have fixed terms, so their next rendezvous with electors is known from day one. Electoral lists are usually established well in advance of the actual date of polling. For most local jurisdictions outside Quebec the elections have not traditionally been partisan -- even when the federal and provincial sympathies are well known among the gladiator class, with voting based on principal rather than principle.(f.1) While it has long been my argument that it is both necessary and desirable to professionalize city politics by engaging the partisans above-board,(f.2) by long-standing convention city campaigns have been less formal and not as professionally conducted as federal and provincial campaigns (in even the smallest provinces). Voter turnout is usually very low; in fact, beyond the communities within the Census Metropolitan Areas it has often proven necessary for local establishments to coerce unsuspecting local notables "to serve" the sentence of a term or two. The central case to be made in this essay is that elections in Canada's major cities have changed and it is in the race for the mayor's chair that the evidence of this now appears most clearly. Campaigns have become more professionally run and gladiators once exclusively focussed on the "senior" levels of government have become extensively involved. While this phenomenon has been manifest in Toronto, Vancouver, Winnipeg and even Montreal over the past few years,(f.3) several reasons for new levels of involvement will be considered in the specific context of the October 1992 mayoralty campaign in Edmonton, Alberta. Essentially, I argue that a combination of factors has caused ideological divisions drawn from the political culture of the city to become sharpened, to represent tangible goals and, in consequence, to cause campaigns to be fought on the cusp of these differences. In examining in considerable detail the functional policy choices made, recent analyses of modern problems in the Canadian metropolis tend to overlook who is in charge of making those choices and how they got there.(f.4) Christopher Leo has stated the situation plainly: "[The] more conventional approach to city politics ... operates on the explicit or implicit assumption that government is a kind of neutral decision-making and implementation machinery that tabulates public opinion and produces policies responsive to the demands it identifies."(f.5) With Leo, I share the perception that politics -- especially in and of the city -- is about ideology actively applied through the electoral pursuit of power. More importantly, it appears that contemporary city politics are themselves evolving in this direction,(f.6) and this essay examines the top level of one such contest. The "non-partisan" labels applied to most major Canadian municipal elections merely disguise the fact that they are anything but apolitical. The suffocating mythology of our urban politics is that they are consensual, boosterish, growth-directed. …