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The Campaign In Full Sentences.
Chris Koentges, Calgary Herald
Published: Friday, November 05, 2010Inside the final three days of the campaign that changed the definition of what our city can be. The team--more defined by its adeptness at winging it than by its purple T-shirts andties--bet on a Calgary that doesn't exist... yet. It was a substantial bet. It was an audacious bet. And today, it remains a collective bet.
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Just after 11 p.m. on the night before the election, two blocks south of City Hall in a minimally furnished basement headquarters, there is a 27" by 34" sheet of paper on the back of the candidate's door. At the top are four headings written with a Sharpie, representing Higgins, McIver, Nenshi and Voter Turnout by percentage. Down the left side are the names of each member of the Nenshi campaign team, several of whom are now crammed inside the candidate's office, trying to figure out what they might have missed. What they are really doing, however, is eyeing the election pool and calculating how to tweak their bets. It is not clear when the act of creating the campaign ended and the act of consuming it began.
View Larger ImageThe Candidate: Naheed Nenshi
Photographed By Randy Gibson
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They are obsessed with the pool, not out of nervousness or bravado, but because they are profoundly curious about which campaign will win. Maybe that's a detachment that comes from living on Twitter and Facebook. Maybe it has something to do with being perpetual outsiders. It seems urgent, for example, that the candidate reach 10,000 Facebook friends on election day. Higgins had levelled out around 1,700 friends earlier in the week. "After that Thursday nobody wanted to wear her as a badge of honour," says the team's pollster, Brian Singh.
A white Jack Russell terrier named Jack sniffs around the office. Someone asks about the schedule on Monday night. Like--what happens after 8 p.m.? Who to phone, who to invite? Different speeches would have to be made. "If it's Ric," the candidate says to the chagrin of his campaign strategist, Stephen Carter, "I'd like to do it in person." The others in the room nod. "If it's Barb, I'll phone her."
Lorie Stewart, the handler, has the candidate getting 36 percent of the vote, McIver 29 and Higgins 23, with 47-percent voter turnout. She moved to Calgary five years ago, having previously worked for eBay at the height of the Silicon Valley rush. But she never connected to Calgary, citing a frustrating kind of over-regulation mixed with a certain kind of greed. She would find small pockets of people who wanted to do better in a social way, but where were the big conversations that had taken place in the Bay Area?
She was not ready to go home to Ontario, though. Vancouver was too wet. On a whim, she boxed up all her possessions and bought a ticket to Peru. Three days before leaving, a visit to the doctor turned into a very rare diagnosis of colorectal cancer. Not only was she going to die, she was going to die alone in a place she had come to despise.
This is where Calgary excels. She lived 10 minutes from the Tom Baker Cancer Centre, where one of the world's foremost experts ran a clinic. She had surgery in December, followed by chemotherapy and radiation. It would have cost her several hundred thousand dollars in the U.S. and she would have essentially been on her own. Here, people she barely knew came out of the woodwork to support her. Halfway through her treatment, she made a deal with herself to embrace Calgary with her entire being. And so, in April 2009, still weak, she found herself dragged to a Calgary incarnation of the TED lecture series. It was a very hard ticket to get. Hopeful attendees needed to submit a written proposal. The candidate gave one of the lectures. Thirteen minutes after it had begun she knew how she was going to make good on her deal.