Ward 12 Coun. Evan Spencer said before he voted yes to citywide rezoning, he had to make peace with the fact that his support for it could mean he won’t get re-elected in 2025.

City councillors approved the contentious measure that would create a base zoning in residential areas of R-CG. The vote was 9-6 in favour of the significantly amended change, which capped off the longest-ever public hearing in Calgary’s history.

In the week leading up to the debate, vocal citizens coalesced around different sides, with many in opposition citing they represented the majority, and that majority would be behind the ouster of councillors who voted in favour.

After the vote was cast, Coun. Spencer posted to his Facebook account the vote results and some rationale for his decision. The comments that were posted in response followed the same theme: Be prepared to find a new job come October.

Whether it has a significant political fallout remains to be seen. It’s still 17 months before Calgarians go to the ballot box.  Still, Spencer said he had to reconcile that aspect, along with the merits of the proposal.

“I had to come to peace in this conversation before I was willing to put a yes vote on this – it could be the end of the road for me, which is OK,” he said.  

“It’s not going to be the end of the road for me being invested in involved and concerned and caring contributing member of this community. But I understood very well, which made this decision very difficult, that politically, this was going to be a big X for a large portion of my ward.”

Spencer has faith that the work he’s doing has his full ward at the centre of it, along with future generations of Calgarians.

Costly decision?

Ward 13 Coun. Dan McLean, who voted against citywide rezoning, posted on social media after the vote that he was disappointed in fellow councillor, Ward 2’s Jennifer Wyness. Wyness voted in favour of the amended citywide rezoning. He suggested on X (formerly Twitter), that “She will probably regret it.”

McLean acknowledged posting the comment, though he said it was posted publicly in error and that it was meant for a direct message. It has since been removed. He stood by his comments, however.

“You saw the outcry. Like I’ve got in my other posts – three-quarters of Calgarians don’t like it,” he said.

“So, when you were knocking on the doors, saying, ‘here, I voted for this,’ I think yeah, there’ll be repercussions. I stand by that.”

Ward 1 Coun. Sonya Sharp, who voted against citywide rezoning, said she expected candidates to start mobilizing in wards in the near future, specifically opposing candidates who voted in favour of citywide rezoning. She said when you see a majority of people coming out to a public hearing opposed to a direction, that speaks volumes.

“Those councillors that supported it will have to defend their why and their willingness to, if they are running in the next election,” Sharp said.

“But yeah, I’ll guarantee this will be an election topic. And you will start seeing all of that come to fruition probably in the next couple of weeks.

“It’s going to be a political topic and I think everyone needs to be ready for it.”

Ward 11 Coun. Kourtney Penner, who voted in favour of citywide rezoning, and was also publicly informed she would be seeking another job in October 2025, said elections happen every four years for a reason: So citizens can choose the candidate that best resonates with their values.

“I would say that these individuals likely didn’t vote for me the first time and no matter what I did, they wouldn’t have voted for me the second time. There’s likely a chance they would have found something else to be mad about,” Penner said.

“I acknowledge that you’re not always going to get consensus on values. You’re not always going to make everybody happy.”

Evidence suggests issues can influence, but there are many variables

UCalgary political scientist Jack Lucas said there’s pretty clear evidence that voters can cast their ballot based on how their councillor voted on a particular issue. That comes down to a voter’s evaluation of their overall satisfaction with the performance of a councillor.

“That satisfaction score for the councillor isn’t entirely determined by how the councillor has voted, but it’s partly determined by those votes. That’s especially true on issues that are high profile,” Lucas said.

“Almost nobody knows how their councillor has voted on more obscure, lower profile issues. On issues like this, where there’s been a lot of coverage, a lot of attention, the vote itself has been reported on widely, that information trickles out into the community and affects how people vote.”

So, will it impact the October election? Lucas said it could go any number of directions. Citizens in a ward could have supported it and their councillor voted against, or vice versa. Also, Lucas said we can’t extrapolate widespread support or opposition to an issue – either city-wide, or by ward – from the perspectives shared at a public hearing.

“We just don’t know how the general public will respond to this issue after they’ve had a chance to consider it, after there’s been campaigning both for and against,” Lucas said.

“Of course, we don’t know how much councillors and challenger candidates will try to mobilize this issue in the election.”

Mount Royal political scientist Duane Bratt said there’s a lot of other noise around the October 2025 municipal election. That includes the province’s reopening of the Local Authorities Election Act and the introduction of union and corporate donors, along with political parties might obscure the citywide zoning issue 17 months from now.

“It’s really tough to predict what this issue will have in relation to all of the other structural changes to the voting,” Bratt said.

Timing is also a factor, Bratt said

If you strip away some of the external factors, Bratt said often the influence of an issue on a municipal electors’ vote is dependent on both time and the stickiness of the issue. He referred to the Alberta carbon tax issue of 2016 and the influence it had on the 2019 provincial election.  In that case, it did have an impact on voter intentions.

“When it comes to municipal politics, though, that’s even more tough because typically people don’t pay as much attention to municipal politics, until (the election) starts getting closer,” Bratt said.

Bratt also said that relying on the people who were at the public hearing to determine the temperature of each ward, or the city itself, wasn’t an accurate measure.  He said we got a flavour of that during the recent recall petition for Mayor Jyoti Gondek.

“There was an awful lot of attention that was given to the recall petition. At the end of the day, they got less than 70,000 signatures, and some of those are invalid,” he said.

He also said that former Ward 7 Coun. Druh Farrell was “despised” by conservative types in Calgary. They went after her nearly every election, Bratt said.

“She always won because she was hugely unpopular in suburban Calgary, but very popular in her ward,” he said.

As far as criticism of specific councillors after the vote, Bratt agreed that many of those commenters likely weren’t going to support that councillor anyway. He said he wouldn’t be surprised if some comments didn’t live in the ward.

Vote shaming is counterintuitive, Penner said

While she’s facing a barrage of criticism, Coun. Penner said the feedback from people isn’t going to get the desired effect.

“I think that people believe if they shame me, or any other politician, or they threatened to not vote for me, in a certain way, that it may change my behaviour,” she said.

“It actually works counterintuitive, I think, to what they’re trying to do.”

Penner said she thinks there’s a misconception that listening to citizens means voting the way they want. That’s not always the case, she said. When a decision is made, there are always trade-offs.

“I listen to constituents on all sides of the argument. I also did a lot of reading, and I evaluated the information, the data that was presented before us,” she said.

“I evaluated that decision against the long-term future success of our city. I have made a decision based on not just what constituents said, but what data says, but what experts say.”

Spencer said that he’s aware that there’s a large chunk of Ward 12 residents that have legitimate concerns to citywide rezoning. Through the debate, they haven’t found a good answer to those worries, he said.

“I believe that the conversation that we had, over those two weeks of public hearing, the amendments that we brought forward, gives me real solid reasoning to bring forward to the community to say, ‘hey, we I listened, I heard and I made sure that some of the issues that you carry or addressed before I voted yes,’” Spencer said.  

“But I know that for a large chunk of folks, nothing other than a no is going to be good enough.”