Date of publication: March 29, 2022 • 19 minutes ago • 3 minutes reading • 51 comments Mayor Jyoti Gondek speaks at Calgary Town Hall on November 8, 2021. Photo by Azin Ghaffari / Postmedia
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What could be a honeymoon after the election has turned into a nightmare for Calgary Mayor Giotti Godek, according to a new poll.
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Five months after she easily won the mayoral seat, Gondek has the support of only 38 percent of Calgary residents, with 53 percent in favor of the thumb and another 9 percent unsure, according to a ThinkHQ online poll. Public Affairs to 1,101 people. . And while individual councilors did somewhat better with a 45 percent approval rating – 14 percent higher than their disapproval – the council as a whole is also considered dim by Calgary residents with a positive 37 percent rating in a survey conducted in March 14-21. . For Godek, this is an unusually low record for a mayor at the beginning of his term and could very well bode well for her political fortune for the rest of her four-year term, said ThinkHQ President Marc Henry.
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“Once you make an initial impression, it’s very difficult to make it recover,” said Henry, who served as mayor Dave Bronconnier’s chief of staff. And the rest of the council tends to be more respectful of a mayor, at least when that mayor’s public office is stable, Henry added. “(Popularity) makes it harder to control your council – when he is a popular mayor, councilors do not want to put up with him,” he said, adding that it is typical for a mayor to be more popular than individual councilors. By contrast, Bronconnier’s positive first-year score was 75 percent and Naheed Nenshi was 86 percent, Henry said. The poll’s findings are dramatic for a leader who garnered 45 percent of the vote in last October’s municipal election and won each of Calgary’s 14 constituencies, making her the city’s first female mayor.
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A number of issues have been aligned with Gondek’s public perception – some beyond its sole control, while others have been mishandled, he said. Just outside the gate was her support for declaring a climate emergency that did not fit well in a city that is still heavily dependent on the oil and gas industry, Henry said, and when quiet action was taken to address green concerns would suffice. Calgary Mayor Jyoti Gondek comments on the Alberta government’s intention to prevent municipalities from enforcing public health rules. Photo by Darren Makowichuk / Postmedia “You could put more power into it by doing it administratively instead of making a statement,” he said. After an unexpectedly high property tax increase of almost 4%, the collapse of the event center agreement and the open dispute with the city police chief and the subversive protests against the restrictions against COVID-19 in Beltline, said Henry .
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“You do not get into a public dispute with the police chief – he is generally more popular than you,” he said. “(Gondek) stepped on every rake.” On Tuesday, the mayor spoke with chalk many of these election numbers to an audience that was gripped by pandemic pressures and a long economic downturn. But he also suggested that difficult decisions played a role. “When people are frustrated, they look at their leaders and express their frustration,” Godek said. “If I had said that in order to be popular, I would not have done anything other than sit quietly for the last few months, but I did not do it because we are elected as a council with a specific mandate to do a lot of hard work.” The mayor and council should not be judged for the first five months when they face scary issues that will take years to address, he said.
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“People chose us to make difficult decisions at a really difficult time, to get them out of trouble,” Godek said. “But there is no one person who can do it in 100 days – we can do it in four years and we will.” The challenges facing the current council cannot be compared to those faced by previous ones, Godek said. The mayor’s approval among women – at 43 percent – was 11 percent higher than among male respondents, while it tended to be more popular with city dwellers than in the suburbs. The margin of error of the poll is plus or minus 2.9 percentage points 19 times in 20. -with files by Stephanie Babych [email protected] Twitter: @BillKaufmannjrn
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