In a historic byelection result, Calgary-Shaw voters chose Kyle Campbell to represent a riding that the UCP had taken for granted.
I’ve heard a few narratives from pundits this week, and I thought it was worth offering an on-the-ground perspective from south Calgary. You can look at aggregate polls or hot takes on X, but the reality lives at the doorsteps of voters.
I grew up in south Calgary. My parents took me to volunteer at Stephen Harper’s Stampede BBQs, and we’d often talk about the provincial government and Premier Ralph Klein and later Premier Ed Stelmach. It was a different political time, when conservative leaders understood they were accountable for their promises.
I know that many people who have grown up or lived for a long time in south Calgary have deep roots in conservative politics, and I don’t dismiss that history. But political support should never be treated as permanent. True accountability means voters get to look at what they were promised, compare it with what they have experienced, and decide whether a government has earned their support again.
Over the last five years, I’ve spent a lot of time talking to voters in the south at their doors. It’s through that lens that I don’t see what happened in Calgary-Shaw as an isolated political surprise. It is part of something bigger happening across south Calgary and all of Alberta.
You could already see signs of it in 2023. Calgary-Acadia and Calgary-Glenmore, both comfortably won by the UCP four years earlier, elected NDP MLAs. Calgary-Shaw also shifted substantially toward the NDP. Across Calgary, the NDP received more votes than the UCP.
The conversations at doors leading up to 2023 were different from what people might have expected in a supposedly safe conservative part of Calgary.
People who had voted conservative for their entire lives were asking harder questions. Some shared with me that they saw more in common with the NDP than they had assumed, including with the kind of pragmatic, responsible, and progressive government they associated with Peter Lougheed. Many were willing to lend us their vote.
A shift in Calgary Shaw from just three years ago
Three years later, knocking alongside Kyle, I talked to people who we hadn’t convinced in 2023, but that had shifted since. These voters told me that they felt the government was severely distracted, and that it had not delivered on the things it promised in exchange for their vote.
They had heard promises of improvements to health care, help with affordability, and competent government focused on their families and communities. Danielle Smith promised then, for example, a 90-day plan to fix health care (that was in October 2022).
The conversations I hear now are about accountability: The gap between those promises and people’s lived experiences.
That lived experience matters. Political messaging can tell people that progress is being made, but voters also judge a government by what they encounter in their own lives. Can they find a family doctor? How long are they waiting for a specialist? Are household costs regulated by the province, such as utilities and insurance, stable? Are rapidly growing communities getting the schools, teachers, and public infrastructure they need?
For many of the people I spoke with, those were not abstract political questions. They were the evidence in front of them.
There is also a broader sense that public services have deteriorated over the past seven years. People do not need to agree on every cause, or every proposed solution, to compare the services they rely on today with what they remember receiving before. Voters should be able to trust that experience when they decide whether promises have been followed through on.
At the same time, they see significant political attention being spent by this government on proposals such as an Alberta Pension Plan, a provincial police force, the health procurement scandal, and now a $200 million referendum in October asking questions about topics like taking away healthcare and school from the children of immigrants, and whether Alberta should separate from Canada.
In this time that calls for national unity, they see Danielle Smith standing shoulder to shoulder with Donald Trump, at the expense of other provinces and the nation.
Voters increasingly willing to hold Alberta provincial government to account
Not every voter cares about every issue, and not everyone I have met reached the same conclusion for the same reason. That matters too. Calgary-Shaw is a large, diverse riding, and it would be a mistake on anyone’s part to reduce thousands of individual votes to a single grievance.
But taken together, the conversations I heard contributed to a larger picture: voters who traditionally supported conservative governments were increasingly willing to hold the UCP accountable for the gap between their promises and their results.
A government can always make another promise. Eventually, voters stop asking what is being promised next and start asking what happened to the promises already made.
Kyle Campbell and the NDP team? They took nothing for granted in Calgary-Shaw.
They knocked on doors. They listened to neighbours. They built new relationships and reached across the political spectrum. They mobilized an extraordinary team of volunteers, and Kyle gave people a reason to trust him and the NDP with their vote.
He was and is out there determined to serve the community where he and his wife, Sarah, are raising their family.
That is one reason Calgary-Shaw should matter to anyone trying to understand the political changes underway in Calgary and Alberta. The result does not prove that south Calgary has suddenly become something entirely different- but what it does show is that longstanding political loyalties are not blank cheques. Voters can have deep political traditions, and still demand accountability. They can support a party in one election and decide three years later that its promises did not match their experience.
For years, Calgary-Shaw was treated by the UCP as the kind of riding where the outcome could be assumed. This week, its voters demonstrated the reality: They want to be heard.
They want results they can see in their families and communities, and they can no longer be taken for granted.
David Cloutier is a lifelong resident of south Calgary, a teacher, past president of the Calgary-Shaw NDP Constituency Association, and was the Alberta NDP candidate in Calgary-Shaw in the 2023 general election.
