While there were some benefits on the campaign trail, former Ward 12 candidate Sarah Ferguson thinks the Calgary Party label may have ultimately hurt her chances to win.

That perception could be reality, according to new research published showing that Calgary voters, to some degree, punished candidates participating with a political party in the 2025 municipal election.

The research was published March 12 by UCalgary political scientist Jack Lucas, along with colleagues R. Michael McGregor, Feodor Snagovsky and Jared Wesley.

Their work concluded that, in the patterns they observed, the party punishment effect grew rather than faded during Calgary’s 2025 municipal election, particularly among those citizens with anti-partisan values, and “compounded by hostility toward the government that introduced the reform.”

Lucas told LWC that initially the researchers thought that anti-partisan sentiment towards political parties, while abundant in Calgary – and across Alberta – would wane once people saw some of the advantages, like what has happened in cities like Vancouver, Montreal or Quebec.

The research was motivated by answering the question of whether that would happen in Calgary.

“We find that the answer is no,” Lucas said.

“If anything, Calgarians became more opposed to the idea of partisan local candidates, rather than less as they became familiar with the party system.”

Structure around the creation of municipal political parties was introduced by the UCP government in 2024 as a pilot project in Calgary and Edmonton. At the time, then-Minister of Municipal Affairs, Ric McIver, said that it would provide a clear line of sight for voters on the potential candidates.

“Over municipal election cycles, there have been plenty of examples in Alberta’s big cities of candidates organizing along party lines, and we are taking this step to enhance transparency for the voters of Calgary and Edmonton to allow candidates to show their party affiliation if they so choose, to give Calgary and Edmonton voters, I think, a better sense of who they are voting for,” Minister McIver said, at the time.

Party outcome in Calgary’s election

In Calgary’s 14 wards, six councillors with party affiliations were elected. In the mayoral race, two of the three highest vote-getting candidates – Jeromy Farkas and Jyoti Gondek – did not have a party affiliation. Unaffiliated candidate Farkas won over Communities First candidate Sonya Sharp.

It’s worth noting that among the six party candidates that did win, it included Ward 4’s DJ Kelly, who was a very close second to Sean Chu in the prior election, and was already considered the favourite to win in that ward, along with long-time Ward 10 Coun. Andre Chabot, who ran with Communities First. Further, Ward 11’s Communities First candidate Rob Ward, who was an unaffiliated close second in the 2021 municipal election, won in a landslide in 2025.

It also included a race in Ward 13 where the only two candidates who ran, Dan McLean and Elliott Weinstein, had party affiliations.

The party dissatisfaction impact shown in the research may have had no greater impact than in Ward 12, where A Better Calgary Party candidate Mike Jamieson squeaked out a win by 59 votes over Calgary Party candidate, Sarah Ferguson.

In hindsight, Ferguson said the party affiliation was a problem at many of the doors, especially among voters that generally favoured her more progressive platform.

“It definitely was more of the conservative-leaning that did not care that I was part of a party, whereas the progressive side did. For a good portion of my campaign, they just didn’t have a choice if they were going to go out and vote. I was the progressive choice, and I was with a party,” she told LWC.

She said there was a noticeable shift toward Brent Curtis, who was unaffiliated, and though perhaps slightly right of centre, he was more progressive than the other two candidates, Jamieson and Communities First candidate Shane Byciuk.

“Because he had that label and wasn’t with a party, I do think that some of the people ended up voting for him over me because I was with a party,” Ferguson said.

There was also a noticeable disconnect between progressive municipal party candidates and provincial parties – and their ground-level organizations – that would have otherwise supported progressive candidates, according to Ferguson.

She said it was difficult to entice those volunteers entrenched with the Alberta NDP to support and help Calgary Party candidates, with some even refusing to be in campaign trail photos because of their ideological opposition to the political party system.

Running as an independent

In Ward 8, Nathan Schmidt decided early on that he was going to campaign specifically on being an independent candidate. It was the right decision for him, simply based on personal principles.

“Then, when we started having conversations with people at the doors, we didn’t expect it to be something that would come up, but sometimes that would be the first question people would ask, and they would say, ‘are you with a party?’” Schmidt recalled.

“I would say, ‘No, I’ve chosen not to be with a party.’ Then they would say, ‘OK, then we can have a conversation.’”

While the research showed that United Conservative Party voters were more likely to be OK with party politics at the municipal level, Schmidt said he recognized that people who identified as longtime conservatives favoured more direct representation, and not party affiliation.

“There was sort of a protest aspect to that,” Schmidt said.

“What you could call longtime conservatives who have been voting that way for a long time who felt really strongly about the principle of having direct representation from their city councillor, and seeing the connection to the party is taking away some of that direct representation, or the opportunity to have that.”

Lucas said that going into the field research, they wondered whether people would ignore those candidates who ran specifically as independents, even given the public’s distaste for party affiliation.

“Our data suggests that that wasn’t the case, that whether a candidate was affiliated with the party or an independent did matter for their choices,” he said.

“It mattered in a way that overall, on average, the party candidates suffered. So, yeah, that, I think, proved to be a successful move for those candidates in emphasizing their independent status. It certainly didn’t hurt them, and if anything, it helped them.”

It was a similar tactic undertaken by Couns. Myke Atkinson (Ward 7) and Harrison Clark (Ward 9), both winners in their ward races.

Would Calgary’s election outcome have been different without parties?

Lucas said that there are too many undetermined factors to conclude that Calgary’s 2025 municipal election would have had a substantially different outcome without party affiliation.

One of the intangibles is the positive impact that parties may have had on the candidates themselves. That could include organization, money, volunteers, exposure and even just being a part of a team instead of being alone.

There also wasn’t even distribution of the so-called punishment of party affiliation, Lucas said.

“The candidates who I think were likely to have suffered were the candidates who were running with the Calgary Party, because the Calgary Party branded itself as a bit more of a center, center-left kind of a position,” he said.  

“So, the people who would have been inclined to support the Calgary Party are also people who are not particularly inclined to be favorable toward the UCP.”

While it’s impossible to conclude that Calgary’s final election results would have been substantially different, Lucas said that they have every reason to believe from the data that the presence of parties affected how people thought about candidates, and that they would have thought differently about those candidates if they were independent and not party-affiliated.

While it wasn’t the only factor – voters still did look at policy positions – it was an influential one, according to the research.

“From the dimension of how voters in Calgary made their decision at this election, their opposition to political parties was more than cheap talk,” Lucas said.

“They really did make choices that were related to their attitudes on political parties.”

Lucas said they hoped to conduct similar research in future municipal elections, should political parties remain, to examine if there is a waning impact on candidates as citizens become more accustomed to municipal political parties.