Red ripple in blue Calgary? Liberals eye record gains in Conservative stronghold
After Trudeau, party hopes high in city that's never elected more than two Liberals
A veteran political organizer in Calgary asked Lindsay Luhnau if she'd consider running for the Liberals last fall.
It was an easy "no thanks" for Luhnau, director of a local investment co-operative — Justin Trudeau's party was polling miles behind the Conservatives, and the leader's name was mud nationwide, let alone in blue Alberta's biggest city.
Then in March, after Mark Carney became Liberal leader, Luhnau reached out to the politico again. Was it too late to get her nomination papers in, after all?
"This was not really a winning proposition six months ago," the Calgary Centre candidate said, as she canvassed blocks in a Marda Loop neighbourhood dominated by red signs bearing her name. This part of the riding went Conservative by almost 20 points in the last election.
With the Liberals hugging onto a national polling lead that defies their previously dismal odds, the party is now campaigning with hopes of achieving the unprecedented and once-unthinkable.
Four red seats in Calgary.
Luhnau is hopeful in Centre, which the Liberals held for a single term in 2015. North of the Bow River, the party believes it can flip Calgary Confederation, the other inner-city district.
In the city's northeast, George Chahal is defending the turf he won in 2021 in Calgary McKnight, trying to make history as the first two-term Liberal MP in Calgary history. And just north of his riding, Hafeez Malik is pushing in the redrawn riding of Calgary Skyview, where Conservatives have been marred by infighting and controversy over their candidates' nomination.
"We have an opportunity to win more seats, but we're going to have to work right to the end to make sure we're able to do that," Chahal told CBC News.
In the middle of the campaign's final week, the Centre, Confederation and Skyview ridings are rated as toss-ups, according to seat projections from polling aggregators 338 Canada and The Writ (by Éric Grenier, the researcher behind CBC's Poll Tracker). Calgary McKnight was forecast by both as a Liberal hold, while both researchers predicted the other seven Calgary seats would likely stay Conservative.
Liberal hopes for Calgary are unusually high, but most campaigners are aware that history and habit aren't on their side in this traditionally Conservative city. They'll need elements to all line up in their favour to rack up multiple wins here, in a city which has been represented by a grand total of three Liberals MPs in all elections since the 1970s.
Carney's leadership seems to be one of those factors putting wind in Liberal sails. Chahal was one of the earliest Liberal MPs to openly call for Trudeau's resignation last year, and he can sense the aversion to voting for the party has eased.
"With Mark Carney, the fear factor is gone," Chahal said.
Liberal aspirations are tied to wooing more voters like Marda Loop resident Christopher Thierman, a self-described fiscal conservative who has long voted that way. The retired telecommunications worker said he admired Carney when he was Bank of Canada governor under then-prime minister Stephen Harper, and has been turned off by the Conservatives now deriding the economist.
But something else has deterred him from his usual Conservative vote — leader Pierre Poilievre. Thierman has backed Centre's Conservative candidate Greg McLean in the past, but won't this time.
"I told him I cannot support his party. I cannot support American-style politics," Thierman said of Poilievre's bare-knuckle political style.
McLean, who has twice won election in a downtown-area riding with a progressive political streak, has long positioned himself as a moderate in the Conservative ranks. His campaign has produced its own pamphlets, rather than the standard-issue pamphlets with big pictures of Poilievre and slogans like "axe the tax" that other campaigns distribute.
One piece of McLean's campaign literature instead features his own picture and while one headline declares "Vote for Leadership," neither the Conservative leader's name or image appear on it.
McLean, the only incumbent MP in these four Liberal-targeted ridings, did not agree to an interview for this story. Nor did the other Conservative candidates.
But in an interview Thursday with the Calgary Eyeopener, McLean acknowledged some of the pushback he gets at doors about Poilievre.
"People worry about tone, and I can tell you that when you're the leader of the Opposition, your job is to be heard," the Centre candidate said.
"I'm very certain that when he's going to be prime minister he's going to grow into that role very effectively as well. Watch and wait."
McLean also highlights the need for change, and how Carney doesn't represent it, given the Liberal platform adds additional spending and deficits to the federal books.
"So far what he's shown is much more of the same as before."
Len Webber, the retiring three-term Conservative member for Confederation, said this election feels more like his first federal election run in 2015 than it did his next two in 2019 or 2021. But in that race a decade ago, he recalls the Liberals threw everything at him and he still won — albeit by 1,500 votes, instead of more than 20,000 and 10,000 in the following two contests.
It may feel tighter than those landslides, Webber said, but he's feeling good about keeping his former seat in the party's tent after campaigning with this year's Conservative contender Jeremy Nixon in the Parkdale neighbourhood recently.
"I would say the better doors far outnumbered the not-so-friendly doors," Webber said.
He's not the only sitting MP to lend Nixon and fellow Calgary candidates some support — a potential sign of the competitiveness they're feeling.
Given how solidly blue some Calgary ridings tend to be, experienced Conservatives in some suburban ridings spend much of their campaign periods in other provinces, door-knocking with candidates hoping to gain seats in the Toronto area, Winnipeg and B.C.'s Lower Mainland.
But with a red tide seeming to lap onto the home shores in 2025, Shuv Majumdar (Calgary Heritage) canvassed in April in Centre and some of the other tight Calgary races, as has Stephanie Kusie (Midnapore) and Blake Richards (Airdrie-Cochrane).
Poilievre himself is scheduled to hold a "whistle stop" rally near the Calgary airport on Friday afternoon.
Chahal is lending similar incumbent support to Skyview candidate Malik, appearing regularly with him at community events.
That riding includes parts of northeast Calgary that were strong for the Liberals in 2021, but also large northern communities west of Deerfoot Trail that have been Conservative strongholds.
But in both McKnight and Skyview, the Conservative candidates were appointed right before the campaign's launch, over the protests of several people who'd been selling party memberships to run in nomination races that were never held.
Ranbir Singh Parmar, one of the former Conservative hopefuls in McKnight, has switched to the Liberals. A former president of the Dashmesh Culture Centre, a major Sikh gurdwara, he endorsed Malik over the Conservatives' Amanpreet Singh Gill, who was also once the gurdwara's president.
"It's a very awkward situation for the party at the moment," said Balwinder Sahota, the president of Skyview's Conservative electoral district association. His own daughter, the riding's former MP, also wanted to run in the never-held nomination — and he told CBC News he's now helping other Conservatives in the city, but not Gill in Skyview.
Calgarians' chilliness toward the federal Liberals goes back much farther than the climate-change and energy policies of Justin Trudeau, or even his father. No Liberals were ever elected in the city until the wartime election of 1940, when both of a smaller city's seats went red (but then reverted to Conservative in the next campaign).
Harry Hays, the namesake of Calgary's federal office building, won as a Liberal in Calgary South in 1963 but lost two years later; and Patrick Mahoney was a one-term wonder for that seat in 1968. A long drought was snapped in 2015 by successful Liberals in Centre and Skyview, but there was a wipeout in 2019 before Chahal's lone win in 2021.
In other words, three Liberal seats out of Calgary's 11 would be the most ever in the city; getting four would double the party's previous record.
In Confederation, the Liberals had to switch candidates after dumping their initial one in the first week. He was replaced by Corey Hogan, a University of Calgary vice-president and political podcaster, whose name recognition has helped bring a surge of volunteers into his campaign office, his team says.
And taking advantage of the fact the provincial NDP has swept the area in the most recent Alberta contest, Hogan's campaign has distributed brochures that depict this contest as between Carney and Alberta Premier Danielle Smith. The brochures highlight some of Smith's controversial comments that draw comparisons between Poilevre and U.S. President Donald Trump, and note that his Conservative rival, former MLA Jeremy Nixon, has most recently worked for the UCP caucus.
Confederation also has a noticeable smattering of NDP signs throughout the riding, in an election where polls show support for Jagmeet Singh's party has plummeted in Alberta and the rest of the country.
Unlike her Liberal and Conservative rivals, university instructor Keira Gunn has been campaigning in Confederation for more than a year.
But she's fighting the perception this has become a Liberal-Conservative race — Hogan's campaign is circulating flyers that report polling aggregator 338 Canada is projecting a toss-up between the red and blue parties, with the NDP only forecast to score a few percentage points.
"It's got to be frustrating for you," one NDP supporter in the Sunnyside neighbourhood told Gunn as she canvassed there last week.
It is. Gunn stresses to everyone she can that 338 Canada isn't reporting on a riding-specific poll, but rather uses a mathematical model to extrapolate how provincial and national poll numbers may swing past results. She vows to endorse a different electoral system — proportional representation — regardless of this election's results.
"I don't want things to move to a two-party system," Gunn said. "I want people to feel good about voting."
Some lawns in Confederation have both her sign and Hogan's, suggesting strategic voting considerations are a matter for debate even within some households.
Confederation is one of the few Calgary ridings in which the Conservatives didn't win more than 50 per cent of the vote last time, which suggests that the non-Conservative vote all tilting one way could prove decisive.
In other places, like Centre and Skyview, Liberal victory may depend on changing some traditionally Conservative minds.
Luhnau recognizes that many Calgarians will remain inaccessible to her party.
"You're gonna have people who are not going to vote for us because we're Liberals, for sure, regardless," she said.
These four seats in Calgary might not determine the election. But a substantially less blue political map of Calgary might reveal something about the city that hasn't been the case before.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
