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Happy spring! April marks half a year until Calgary’s municipal election, and as we get closer to October and continue building The Sprawl’s candidate tracker, a clearer picture is coming into view of the Calgarians who want to form the next city council.

Nearly half of council candidates so far are running for municipal parties (22 out of 46) with the rest running independently. And parties are trying to figure out ways to avoid splitting the right-of-centre vote.

Before we get to the vote splitting issue, let’s do a quick recap of the three parties. The order in which they registered with Elections Calgary doubles as a rough guide to where each sits on the political spectrum, going from left to right.

The Calgary Party was first to register (November 2024), with employment lawyer Brian Thiessen running for mayor. “We see ourselves as the only centrist option—fiscally responsible and socially moderate,” said Thiessen, a former chair of the city’s police commission. The party has seven councillor candidates so far.

Communities First was second to register (February 2025). Councillor Sonya Sharp, who spearheaded the Flames arena deal and has been an outspoken critic of blanket rezoning, announced her Communities First mayoral run on March 31. The party’s first policy proposal is to repeal blanket rezoning. Communities First has six councillor candidates so far.

A Better Calgary Party is the third and possibly final party to register (March 2025), describing itself as a centre-right party of “common sense conservatives.” The party has said it wants to “unite the right,” following the example of provincial and federal conservative parties. A Better Calgary Party has seven councillor candidates so far but no mayoral candidate—yet.

Again, these parties only account for half of candidates to date. Mayor Jyoti Gondek is also running for re-election independently. Former councillors Jeff Davison and Jeromy Farkas are also running for mayor and aren’t affiliated with parties.

Now to the vote splitting issue—"a real problem" for the right, as A Better Calgary Party VP Kerry George put it earlier this year.

Ward 10 Councillor Andre Chabot is heading into his tenth municipal election campaign. The veteran conservative councillor is running under the Communities First banner and acknowledges that Communities First and A Better Calgary Party are trying to reach many of the same right-of-centre voters.

“It's something that we're trying to work through right now to see if we can get some alignment, especially in some key ridings where we feel we've got a strong candidate that has a high likelihood of success,” said Chabot. “And I would say the same thing for them. They have some candidates and some ridings that they believe have a high likelihood of success.”

“You know what, they're not very far from our vision,” Chabot added. “So I do believe that there's a potential for some synergy there between us and them to try and find some ridings where we have the greatest chance of success without splitting the vote.”

While Communities First describes itself as a party by necessity, selecting and announcing candidates after vetting them, A Better Calgary Party has gone a different route. “We're following the model that's used by both the Conservative Party of Canada and the United Conservative Party of Alberta, where we're going to hold nomination contests to choose our candidates,” said party president Gordon Elliott, who’s running in Ward 1.

“Anybody who's a member of these parties will feel very, very comfortable with A Better Calgary Party,” he added.

A Better Calgary Party has one way to avoid vote splitting with other conservative candidates in a couple wards. “We have what's called a bypass vote,” said Elliott. “So if there's an incumbent in a certain ward that our members like and really don't want to run a candidate against, they can bypass our nomination contest process.” If members choose this, there’d be no party candidate in that ward.

Ward 13 in southwest Calgary is a likely one, where Dan McLean is councillor—a conservative incumbent who is running for Communities First. But Elliott says it’ll be up to members to decide. “We're just in the process of organizing this bypass vote, but I would be very surprised if they want us to run a candidate against Dan McLean.”

So far Communities First and A Better Calgary Party are only up against each other in Ward 7 (where incumbent Councillor Terry Wong is the Communities First candidate) and Ward 1, where Elliott is running and there is no incumbent now that Sharp is running for mayor. Kim Tyers, a longtime constituency manager and assistant for multiple provincial and federal conservative politicians, is the Ward 1 candidate for Communities First.

Former councillor John Mar, who was going to run in Ward 6 for Communities First, is withdrawing his candidacy, citing personal reasons. Communities First says it isn’t looking for a replacement candidate in Ward 6—at least, not now—but Sharp says more candidates will be announced later in April. “We’re hoping that we can get as many candidates as we can to fill as many seats as possible,” Sharp said.

The Calgary Party, meanwhile, plans to run candidates everywhere it can. “We will be running candidates in all 14 of the wards,” Thiessen said. “Stay tuned. There'll be an announcement shortly after the federal election.”

Right now the federal election is eclipsing all else. “A lot of our members are supporting candidates of the Conservative Party of Canada, and as a result, will be volunteering in the federal election… It's pretty hard to drag them away from that for municipal politics,” said Elliott. “But come April 29, we’re off and running.”

Regardless of when you check The Sprawl’s municipal candidate tracker—whether now or after the federal election—we’ll keep building and updating it so it’s ready for you whenever you need it.

Jeremy Klaszus is founder and editor of The Sprawl.