The Calgary mayoral election is making big headlines (see “here”:http://news.asiaone.com/News/AsiaOne%2BNews/World/Story/A1Story20101020-243169.html, “here”:http://www.montrealgazette.com/Calgary+elects+Canada+first+Muslim+mayor+major+city/3695541/story.html, and “here”:http://ca.news.yahoo.com/s/reuters/101019/canada/canada_us_calgary) over the fact that newly elected mayor Naheed Nenshi is the first Muslim to be elected mayor of a major Canadian city. Some other interesting facts from the race:
* In addition to being a Muslim, Nenshi is also an academic!
* Nenshi’s campaign was boosted by his “prolific Tweeting and online posts”:http://www.montrealgazette.com/Calgary+elects+Canada+first+Muslim+mayor+major+city/3695541/story.html
* Nenshi apparently started the race as a “longshot”:http://ca.news.yahoo.com/s/reuters/101019/canada/canada_us_calgary, positioned well behind the top two candidates for the position. (Theories of strategic voting suggest that this ought to have led his supporters to defect to one of the top two candidates, so if anyone can get their hands on polling data related to the race, this might make for an interesting case study.)
* Perhaps most shockingly for those of us south of the border, the campaign lasted only four weeks!
I also feel compelled to note that according to “Reuters”:http://ca.news.yahoo.com/s/reuters/101019/canada/canada_us_calgary, his victory has been labelled the _Purple Revolution_ for the color of his campaign materials. As much as I am heartened by the election of a blogging academic to a position of power in a major metropolitan area, I can’t help by be a bit worried about the devaluing of the “Colored Revolution”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colour_revolution label. 10,000 Friends on Facebook is simply not the same thing as spending three weeks worrying about potential armed crackdowns while freezing one’s butt off in the dead of winter in Kiev. What’s next, the eBay Revolution following the California Gubernatorial election? The horror….
[As should be evident from this post, I am obviously no expert on Canadian politics, let alone Canadian city politics. So if anyone with some real knowledge of this election would like to submit a guest post, feel free to email me directly and I’ll set it up.]