Mayor Dave Bronconnier will sit on city council for a third term, but voters have booted out three of his aldermanic colleagues in an election that saw a much higher voter turnout than in 2004.

“Three incumbents are going down to defeat — that is unprecedented in Calgary,” says the Better Calgary Campaign’s Naheed Nenshi of the October 15 election results. “Incumbents never lose.” More than 33 per cent of eligible Calgarians voted, compared with less than 20 per cent in 2004.

Bronconnier enjoyed a predictable victory, even though he took only 61 per cent of the vote — down from 79 per cent in 2004. His main challenger, Alnoor Kassam, took 17 per cent of the vote despite reportedly spending more than $1 million on his campaign.

Incumbents Helene Larocque (Ward 3), Craig Burrows (Ward 6) and Madeleine King (Ward 8) were all unseated by challengers. “We knew it was going to be a tight race,” says Mar, who beat King by only 167 votes. “We were going up against an incumbent, which is the hardest thing you can do in a municipal election.” (A disappointed-looking King quietly left her downtown campaign headquarters just after 10 p.m. election night after telling reporters “things don’t look good.”)

In Ward 3, Jim Stevenson beat George Chahal by a mere 33 votes. The vote was recounted October 17, and after the recount Stevenson was still ahead by 33. Incumbent Larocque — who was well financed by unions — earned only 26 per cent of the vote. “She angered the community associations, which in civic ward politics is the last thing you want to do,” says Mount Royal College political analyst Keith Brownsey. Nenshi, who ran against Larocque in 2004 and lost, says Larocque was a “lousy incumbent.”

In one of the most surprising election results, Burrows ended up almost 2,500 votes behind the victorious Joe Connelly in Ward 6. Like Larocque, Burrows had trouble with community associations and leaders in his ward — he was another “lousy incumbent,” says Nenshi. Connelly, a former community association president and former vice-president of Tourism Calgary, says bad communication was ultimately Burrows’s downfall. “(People) weren’t getting answers from city hall,” Connelly says.

Ward 11, which was vacated by outgoing alderman Barry Erskine, also has a new face in Brian Pincott. An environmental activist and theatre technician, Pincott has run for public office four times — twice for the federal NDP, and twice for alderman. “I’ve been proud of every single campaign that we’ve done and every single result that we’ve had over the years,” says Pincott, who beat second-place candidate Evonne Whelan by more than 1,500 votes. “But to actually put one in the win column is different.”

In Ward 1, challenger Jennifer Banks gave veteran alderman Dale Hodges good competition, even though she lost by almost 4,000 votes. “To hold a 24-year alderman to 56 per cent of the vote when you’re a 35-year-old political neophyte who’s not that well known in the community — holy cow,” says Nenshi, referring to Banks’s capture of 40 per cent of the vote. “That’s a message to Dale Hodges, and that means that we’re going to see Jennifer Banks sitting around the city council table three years from now.” Banks says she’s disappointed by the result, but plans on running in 2010. “That was the plan all along — to build for next time,” she says.

Despite Pincott’s election, the new council is widely expected to shift slightly to the right side of the political spectrum. “Stevenson is very much on the far right,” Brownsey says. “He’s already talked about his ideological agenda, about privatizing services…. We’ve had these debates. We know that those options are simply more expensive and they’re payoffs to the private sector.

“Combine (Stevenson) with Ric McIver and Diane Colley-Urquhart — both of whom are jockeying for a position in the next mayoralty race — and you could end up with a very divisive, fractious council, if not bordering on dysfunctional.” (Ward 9 Ald. Joe Ceci, who beat challenger Al Koenig by more than 2,200 votes, also hinted on election night that he may run for mayor in 2010.)

Council doesn’t meet until November 12, and transportation will undoubtedly be one of the first things the new council tackles. Bronconnier, who pledged during the campaign to significantly expand the C-Train system and build a new west leg, says he’ll bring the plan to council for approval sometime in the next two months.

Campaign finance rules will also be addressed by the new council. “The public outcry and potential outrage over campaign finance means that we need to have campaign finance guidelines in place before the next municipal election,” says Pincott, who made campaign finance reform a key plank in his platform. “There’s no doubt in my mind that we need to do that.” Bronconnier also says campaign financing will be revisited — a significant shift from his position during the campaign, when he told Fast Forward no changes were needed.