UCP and NDP Presidents Rob Smith and Bill Tonita running in municipal elections
Provincial board leaders on the ballot in Mountain View and Strathcona County
The introduction of municipal political parties in Calgary and Edmonton has generated a lot of confusion and consternation in this election but lost in the noise of the big city debate is that the presidents of Alberta’s two main provincial political parties are on ballots in county elections outside urban centres.
United Conservative Party President Rob Smith is running as a candidate in Mountain View County council’s Division 6 and Alberta NDP President Bill Tonita is running for re-election in Strathcona County’s Ward 4
Smith, who is not related to party leader Premier Danielle Smith, is challenging incumbent councillor Peggy Johnson in an area outside of Olds that includes the rural communities of Hainstock, Westward Ho, Eagle Hill, Harmattan, and Innis Lake. Johnson is a former instructor at Olds College and is running for a second term on the municipal council. Ken Musselman is also running in the division.
Smith’s campaign material lists his #1 priority as “protecting agriculture and farmers, including the land and property rights of ALL ratepayers.”
“I really want to have some very, very strong input from all of our farmers about where they feel that balance should come into play. If farmers have innovative ideas about business development or if there are innovative ideas that bring development into the county I think we need to pay attention to that,” Smith said when asked about economic development at an all-candidates forum in the ward. “To me, agriculture and business development are the two most important focuses and it should be for this country as well.”
Smith is also running for re-election as the UCP President at the party’s AGM in Edmonton at the end of November.
His two years as president have seen the party solidify its lead over the NDP in the polls and generate impressive fundraising returns, but it has also been defined by an extremely motivated base of party activists who have catapulted the UCP towards open skepticism of vaccinations, an embrace of MAGA-inspired anti-transgender policies, and the bolstering of a strong separatist wing of the party.
Before his election as UCP President, Smith was president of the local UCP association in the Olds-Didsbury-Three Hills riding.
If elected, Smith will serve alongside councillor Tiffany Nixon, who was acclaimed in the neighbouring Division 4. Nixon is the wife of Rimbey-Rocky Mountain House-Sundre UCP MLA and Minister of Seniors, Community and Social Services Jason Nixon.
To the east of Edmonton, NDP President Tonita is running for re-election in Strathcona County’s Ward 4, which includes the Sherwood Park neighbourhoods of Lakeland Village, Jubilee Landing, Summerwood, Davidson Creek, and Clarkdale Meadows and county acreage communities like Tidan Heights, Akenside, developing areas like Cambrian, and the surrounding rural areas.
A retired local teacher and high school principal, Tonita has served on Strathcona County council since 2017 and was re-elected with 62 per cent of the vote in 2021.
“There’s a lot of things that we’ve accomplished over the last four years and I’d like to continue to see them get over the finish line,” Tonita told the Sherwood Park News in a September interview. “I’m really proud of the work that we did in getting Cambrian off the ground, seeing so many houses being built and seeing a new community being established.”
He was elected president of the Alberta NDP at the party’s May 2025 convention in Edmonton, the first major gathering of the NDP since Naheed Nenshi won the leadership race in 2024.
Tonita is facing a challenge in this municipal election from Krystal Hampel, who was endorsed last week by former Progressive Conservative MLA Dave Quest. Quest represented the area in the Legislature from 2008 to 2015 and ran for the Alberta Party in the riding in 2019. His endorsement video included a shot at Tonita when he said Hampel is a candidate who would serve an entire term.
Tonita ran for the NDP in the 2023 election in Strathcona-Sherwood Park and was considered one of the NDP’s strong candidates in ring of ridings surrounding Edmonton known by politicos as “the donut.” The NDP picked up the neighbouring Sherwood Park riding with Kyle Kasawski’s win, but Tonira finished with 44.5 percent behind UCP MLA Nate Glubish, who was re-elected with 53 per cent.
Tonita hasn’t publicly announced whether he would run again in the next provincial election but an electoral boundary review currently underway could dramatically redraw the riding (the interim report from the electoral boundaries commission is due by the end of this month).
Both party presidents are running an Independents as the provincial government’s introduction of municipal political parties is limited to Calgary and Edmonton.
Andrew Knack, Jeromy Farkas in the lead in mayoral elections
It’s the gift every election candidate in Alberta dreams of in the final stretch of the campaign: a Janet Brown poll showing you’re in the lead.
That’s what big city mayoral candidates Andrew Knack and Jeromy Farkas got on October 10. Two polls commissioned by CBC and conducted by well-respected pollster Janet Brown showed Knack in the lead in Edmonton’s mayoral race and Farkas leading in the race to become Calgary’s next mayor.
The poll showed Knack with 41 per cent support in Edmonton, with well-funded Better Edmonton Party candidate Tim Cartmell in second with 21 per cent and Omar Mohammad and Michael Walters tied for third with 10 per cent each. Former Conservative MP Rahim Jaffer sat at 7 per cent and former councillor Tony Caterina had 6 per cent.
The Calgary poll showed Farkas with 27 per cent and incumbent Mayor Jyoti Gondek and Communities First Party candidate Sonya Sharp with 23 per cent each. Former councillor Jeff Davison placed fourth with 16 per cent and lawyer and Calgary Party candidate Brian Thiessen placed a distant fifth with 8 per cent.
People who follow politics closely will know that polls are snapshots in time and that voters can change their minds in an campaign (the polls also showed a huge number of undecided voters). But one of the things that makes Brown’s two mayoral polls more interesting than just a regular voter intention poll is that she delves a bit deeper into how voters are feeling about the candidates by asking them which other candidates they could be considering voting for. This adds some interesting context to the findings.
Cartmell’s big money mayoral campaign in Edmonton
Tim Cartmell’s mayoral campaign stalling in the polls became even more surprising last week when Elections Edmonton financial disclosures showed that his campaign raised more than $800,000 by the end of July, largely because of corporate and wealthy individual donors. That means Cartmell’s campaign will have raised almost more money than all the other mayoral candidates combined and the most money of any mayoral candidate in Edmonton’s history.
Cartmell’s early start and Better Edmonton Party slate of council candidates should, in theory, give him a voter identification advantage on October 20. But Cartmell’s series of missteps, including his recently fumbling and bumbling when asked a simple question about whether his corporate donors put him in a conflict of interest, is not an inspiring performance of a future mayor.
Look who else is running 👀
I took a quick scan through the hundreds of municipal elections happening across Alberta and noticed that there are a few former MLAs on municipal ballots:
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