Success Stories - Naheed Nenshi and the triumph of ideas

November 2010

Impressive.

It’s as good a word as any to describe Naheed Nenshi’s recent victory in the Calgary mayoral election.

Impressive for a number of reasons.

There was the come-from-behind victory over two high profile opponents.

There was the way he used social media to engage and attract young Calgarians to his message.

But what may be the most impressive thing about Nenshi’s victory is how little it mattered that he is Muslim or the son of South-Asian origin immigrant parents.

“Naheed’s victory is important for lots of reasons, but the patronizing ‘stunning breakthrough for diversity in Calgary’ meme isn’t one of them,” tweeted the Minister of Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism Jason Kenney shortly after Nenshi’s victory.  Kenney is also the regional minister for Calgary and the MP for Calgary Southeast.

The Minister says he doesn’t think Nenshi’s ethnicity or religion mattered at all to the Calgary electorate. “It simply wasn’t an issue,” said Kenney.

Jim Frideres is a professor at the University of Calgary and the chair of the board of Immigrant Services Calgary. He thinks Nenshi’s victory really represents a triumph of the platform he brought to the campaign.

“He stuck to three or four issues that he articulated very well,” says Frideres. “His background wasn’t an issue, and if it was, it was his background as a Harvard graduate with some business credentials that people noticed.”

Nenshi himself is keen to highlight how important he thinks ideas were to his success.

“One of the really exciting things about this city... we are a place of boundless opportunity,” he said in a televised interview shortly after his election. “Nobody cares who your Daddy was.”

During the same interview, Nenshi said merit matters more in Calgary, and he built his campaign around that idea.

“We thought Calgarians are ready to have a real conversation about tough, important issues, so let’s have that conversation,” he said.

Nenshi said he released 12 policy platforms during the campaign, each of which were more detailed than the entire platform of his two main opponents.

Nenshi also thinks the way he went about having that conversation with Calgarians was important to his victory.

“We wanted to have authentic conversations with people,” he said in the same interview.

“A lot of people now live online,” he continued, referring to how his campaign used social media tools like Facebook and Twitter to engage with Calgarians.

But it’s not as if Nenshi went through the entire campaign without having some thoughts on his religion and his ethnicity.  Even when he talked about those things however, the larger context was that ideas matter more.

“I don’t shy away from the colour of my skin.  I don’t shy away from my faith.  I don’t shy away from my background or my education or my experience.  All that is part of the crazy mix that makes up Naheed, and all of it is part of the crazy mix that is Calgary,” he said on election night.

He also suggested the next day that he recognized that perhaps there is greater meaning in his triumph.

“My greatest hope is that this morning... kids from across the city—northeast to southwest, every ethnicity, every income level, every neighbourhood, every single one of those kids—say, ‘what a country we live in, what a city we live in, because I can be anything.’”

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