My home town has municipal elections happening in just over two weeks, and there are (surprise!) quite a few people who want to be the next mayor of Calgary. Apparently the incumbent's 52% approval rating is just low enough for a crop of opportunists to toss their hat in the ring, hoping to get lucky. Most of them are simply boring, with lazy, boilerplate "policy" platforms that begin and end with "I'll lower your taxes while maintaining program spending at current levels."
[As a quick aside, I just want to note that any politician who promises to reduce revenue generation while maintaining or increasing spending is not worth your vote. This is literally the laziest, and most dishonest, thing that a politician can say to you. They know that this is not possible, but they either think you're too stupid to realize that, or they just don't care enough to have bothered thinking up some actual policies to run on. Do not vote for anyone who makes this promise to you, and then refuses to explain their plan for making this work.]
However, there is one candidate who really does manage to stand out from the rest of this year's crop of opportunists, panderers, and chancers, one candidate whose sheer laziness and stupidity truly astounds. That man is Bill Smith.
Bill Smith joined the race by decrying Calgary's property tax rate, which he claimed had increased by 51% over his incumbent opponent's terms of office... a claim so ludicrous that even other challengers for the mayor's office had to disagree. Local property taxes were going to be his signature issue, and his first public pronouncement on the issue proved, conclusively, that he doesn't understand how property taxes work.
[Incidentally, the property tax rate, or mill rate, in Calgary has risen from $3.25 per $1000 of property value to $3.91 per $1000 of property value, and increase of 20.3% -- your tax bill might have increased if the value of your property increased because of, say, inflation, but that's not a tax rate increase. And, yes, Bill Smith was promising to reduce your tax rate while maintaining program spending... somehow. Lazy, lazy, lazy...]
But Bill Smith isn't done. No, no, he's a contender, and if he can't make waves with the property tax issue (because he's too lazy to learn how property tax rates work, and too lazy to put together an actual policy platform), he'll just blanket the city with advertising, hoping that name recognition will somehow produce electoral gains that he hasn't bothered to actually, you know, earn.
Which is how we get this ad, as reported by CBC News:
Yes, those red dots you see on that image are, indeed, spelling mistakes. Because why would a candidate this lazy have bothered to properly proof read his own fucking ad before running it in the local Sun?
From CBC News:
A full-page newspaper ad for Calgary mayoral candidate Bill Smith is making the rounds on social media — for all the wrong reasons.
The ad, placed by Smith's campaign team, ran in Sunday's edition of the Calgary Sun. It was rife with spelling and grammar mistakes, ranging from spelling "council" as "coulcil" and "whether" as "wheather."
[...]
Alan Middleton, a marketing professor at the Schulich School of Business at York University in Toronto, says the old advertising adage "any publicity is good publicity" is not accurate.
"Bad publicity damages the brand you're trying to sell," Middleton said Tuesday, adding the mistakes can impact Smith's credibility, especially among undecided voters.
"So what this would signal to me is, if this guy can't even supervise accurate communication in an ad, how good is he going to be running budgets and looking after legislation as mayor?"
Mayor Naheed Nenshi had responded to news about his ever-so-slightly-sliding approval numbers by saying that he wasn't worried. With ten candidates of this caliber splitting the anti-Nenshi vote, I can understand why he's so confident.
BTW, Bill Smith's day job? He's a lawyer. Meaning he attended university, and then law school, and then passed a bar exam, all without learning how to spell "council." And then decided to run for the job of as the head of Calgary's City Council.
He was also the president of the Alberta Progressive Conservative Party, which decended from decades of majority government to having too few seats in the legislature to qualify for official party standing, and has now ceased to exist after the official opposition Wildrose party absorbed them... which may explain why Bill Smith is now keen to try his hand municipal politics, instead. Excelsior!
I continue to be astounded by Calgary's conservative politicians, though. Having just witnessed a provincial election in which voters rejected both the right-wing PCs, and the farther-right Wildrose, instead handing a majority governing mandate to the left-of-center New Democratic Party, conservative polticians have apparently learned nothing at all, and are still campaigning on the same tired trickle-down economics that have been their hallmark for decades. In rural Alberta, which leans more to the right, this message might still resonate, but Alberta's cities, of which Calgary is the largest, went strongly in a progressive/leftish direction last election; I don't know why anyone running for elected office in Calgary would not be following suit.
Especially in the mayoral race, against the incumbent Naheed Nenshi, who is unabashedly a progressive-leaning politician (i.e. willing to raise taxes in order to support infrastructure investment and program spending), and whose approval ratings are still about 50% in spite of the fact that Calgary has been hit hard by an economic downturn that's spanned the entirety of his most recent term of office. Normally, a long-lasting recession favours challengers over the incumbent, and it would be normal for Nenshi's approval/disapproval rating to be underwater after three years of a bad economy, but he's still popular... and yet, his political opponents don't seen to have grokked that his progressive, populist politics might just be the reason why.
So Calgary's voters will vote, and roughly half of them will vote for Nenshi again, with the other half splitting their votes among the other nine mayoral candidates, with only Andre Chabot (who's currently on the Council, and who'll probably pull good support in his own Ward) posting anything like a real challenge.
And Bill Smith? After his stumbling start and very public face plant, I don't expect him to finish in the top five.
He was also the president of the Alberta Progressive Conservative Party, which decended from decades of majority government to having too few seats in the legislature to qualify for official party standing, and has now ceased to exist after the official opposition Wildrose party absorbed them... which may explain why Bill Smith is now keen to try his hand municipal politics, instead. Excelsior!
I continue to be astounded by Calgary's conservative politicians, though. Having just witnessed a provincial election in which voters rejected both the right-wing PCs, and the farther-right Wildrose, instead handing a majority governing mandate to the left-of-center New Democratic Party, conservative polticians have apparently learned nothing at all, and are still campaigning on the same tired trickle-down economics that have been their hallmark for decades. In rural Alberta, which leans more to the right, this message might still resonate, but Alberta's cities, of which Calgary is the largest, went strongly in a progressive/leftish direction last election; I don't know why anyone running for elected office in Calgary would not be following suit.
Especially in the mayoral race, against the incumbent Naheed Nenshi, who is unabashedly a progressive-leaning politician (i.e. willing to raise taxes in order to support infrastructure investment and program spending), and whose approval ratings are still about 50% in spite of the fact that Calgary has been hit hard by an economic downturn that's spanned the entirety of his most recent term of office. Normally, a long-lasting recession favours challengers over the incumbent, and it would be normal for Nenshi's approval/disapproval rating to be underwater after three years of a bad economy, but he's still popular... and yet, his political opponents don't seen to have grokked that his progressive, populist politics might just be the reason why.
So Calgary's voters will vote, and roughly half of them will vote for Nenshi again, with the other half splitting their votes among the other nine mayoral candidates, with only Andre Chabot (who's currently on the Council, and who'll probably pull good support in his own Ward) posting anything like a real challenge.
And Bill Smith? After his stumbling start and very public face plant, I don't expect him to finish in the top five.
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