CBC News has projected that Naheed Nenshi will be re-elected as mayor of Calgary.
Nenshi has maintained a strong lead in Calgary’s mayoral race throughout Monday night over his closest competitor, Bill Smith, as results trickled in after polls closed at 8 p.m. MT.
Some polling stations were forced to stay open late due to a deluge of voters and shortage of ballots.
Not only were some voting stations bursting at the seams, but results from the City of Calgary’s live results website were slow to load and crashed repeatedly Monday night.
The city said it was aware of the problem and was looking at alternate ways to get the results out.
Bill Smith supporters wait for results on election night. (Monty Kruger/CBC)
By 11:38 p.m. MT, official results showed incumbent Naheed Nenshi was in the lead over his main challenger Bill Smith, with 92,785 for Nenshi and 79,689 for Smith.
Jason Ribeiro, a policy advisor to Nenshi, said the campaign wasn’t commenting on whether they thought the race was over.
“We’ve been cautiously optimistic,” Ribeiro said.
“We’ll wait to comment until Bill Smith and his team call to concede this election.”
Meanwhile, spirits remained high at Smith’s election night headquarters.
“I’m not sure whether we’ll have a close race or not: that remains to be seen,” said Ric McIver, the United Conservative Party MLA for Calgary Hays.
“But the fact that it’s a competitive race is because there’s a lot of unhappiness over what’s happened over the last seven years. We’ll find out tonight whether there’s enough to overturn the mayor’s chair.”
Beyond the mayor’s race, some incumbent councillors were facing tough battles to retain their seats.
In Ward 7, Druh Farrell was fending off Brent Alexander, while in Ward 9, Gian Carlo-Carra was within 10 votes of challenger Cheryl Link as of 11:30 p.m. MT.
In Ward 1, Coral Bliss Taylor was within 100 votes of incumbent Ward Sutherland, who faced criticism in the dying days of the campaign for comments he made at a public forum referring to “Johnny Jew from New York” as a hypothetical artist hired under the city’s public art policy.
More to come
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