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It used to be that if you were on Calgary city council, it was relatively easy to stay there for a long time.

For decades, cakewalk elections for incumbent mayors have been the norm. Mayor Naheed Nenshi never faced a close challenge in his 11 years as mayor. Bill Smith came closest in 2017, winning 44% of the vote to Nenshi’s 51%.

Mayor Dave Bronconnier (2001 - 2010) was likewise untouchable until he decided to call it quits, as was Mayor Al Duerr in the 1990s and Mayor Ralph Klein in the 1980s.

Basically, when you were mayor of Calgary, you were mayor until you decided you didn’t want to be any longer. Calgarians haven’t punted an incumbent mayor since they chose Klein over Ross Alger in 1980, the same year the Calgary Flames arrived in town from Atlanta.

And if you were a councillor, the same was true. Losing was rare.

You can count on one hand the number of incumbent Calgary councillors who have lost in the past 15 years: Linda Fox-Mellway in 2010, Gael MacLeod and John Mar in 2013 (Mar is returning and running in a different ward this year), and Diane Colley-Urquhart and Joe Magliocca (who was found guilty in January of fraudulent expense claims) in 2021.

Over that same stretch of time, incumbents have been reelected 34 times.

Jack Lucas, a University of Calgary political scientist who focuses on municipal politics, has dug deeply into incumbency advantage in Calgary and Canada more broadly. His research shows the scale of incumbents’ advantage: “In Alberta’s two biggest cities, Calgary and Edmonton, incumbent re-election rates since the 1990s have consistently surpassed 90%.”

“You're talking about nine in every 10 incumbents who seeks re-election is successful,” says Lucas. “That's much higher than what we see in provincial or federal elections in Canada, and it's higher than what we see in many elections in other democratic countries.”

Municipal incumbents have always had an edge, but it hasn't always been as significant as it is today. And if you’re opposed to political parties at the municipal level—which most Albertans are, according to numerous surveys—Lucas’s work might make you think twice about your position.

Calgary used to have municipal political parties before its recent era of party-free politics. “It began in the early 1920s,” says Lucas. “It grew through the ’30s and ’40s. Most candidates who were winning office in Calgary were part of a political party. And then in the ’50s and ’60s, it began to fade.”

Having municipal parties contributed to more fresh blood on council than we see today. “What I found in Calgary and the other Western Canadian cities that I studied was that the incumbent success rate declined, the incumbency advantage declined a little bit, when parties were in the mix,” Lucas says.

This has to do partly with informational “cues” available to voters in elections, or lack thereof in a party-free system.

“The absence of partisan cues makes for a much more challenging information environment,” write Lucas and co-authors Michael McGregor and Kim-Lee Tuxhorn in a 2022 paper. “Voters in large, non-partisan elections such as Calgary must work especially hard to learn about challenger candidates even when high-quality challengers are in the race.”

Enter the incumbency advantage: “In these genuinely non-partisan elections, incumbency often looms large as the only easily accessible and high-quality informational cue available.”

Potential candidates, meanwhile, can be scared off from the outset by incumbency advantage.

"I think we see strong evidence in some election contests in Calgary, historically, of this kind of scare-off where people say, 'I thought about running, but I don't think I want to bother because I know the incumbent is going to win anyway,'" says Lucas.

But in 2025, with anti-incumbent sentiment sweeping the globe and municipal parties in the mix once again, Mayor Jyoti Gondek (who is running as an independent) faces a tougher road to re-election than her mayoral predecessors.

Meanwhile, numerous councillors are leaving after one term. Jasmine Mian, Courtney Walcott and Evan Spencer are not running again. Expect that list to grow longer.

Even incumbents who are running again are positioning themselves as fighting against incumbency. When the Communities First party launched in December, four sitting councillors announced that they were running to replace a “dysfunctional” city council. The Communities First councillors account for nearly one-third of that council. Three are rookies (Sonya Sharp, Terry Wong and Dan McLean); the fourth, Andre Chabot, is Calgary’s longest-serving councillor, first elected in 2005.

While the incumbent advantage may be changing rapidly, other changes to municipal politics have been slower. The job has become increasingly professionalized in recent decades, and voters get to have their say at the ballot box less frequently than in the past.

Being on city council used to be a part-time gig. In 1983, only three councillors treated it as full time, and the job paid $22,628, or around $65,000 in 2025 dollars. Today the councillor job is very much full time and pays $124,462. (The mayoral salary is $220,299.)

City council terms have also lengthened over time, here and elsewhere. In Calgary’s earliest days, elections happened annually. Then, in the early 20th century, it was every two years. In the 1970s, the province stretched municipal terms to three years and, in 2012, made them their current length of four years.

As terms have lengthened, so have municipal political careers.

“When you have elections only every four years and on average eight or nine of 10 incumbents are getting re-elected, it's just a slower process of changing the complexion of city council,” Lucas says.

But while much is changing in Calgary municipal politics, not everything is.

“Life is a strange mixture of black and white,” wrote Grant MacEwan in 1963, his last year of being a city councillor before becoming mayor, “and nowhere will a person encounter more striking extremes of joy and sorrow, headaches and thrills, bouquets and brickbats than in public service at the civic level. There, close to the people, close to the wallets from which taxes are paid and close to the garbage can problems, politics can be at its roughest.”

MacEwan noted that Calgary’s very first council meeting, after town incorporation in 1884, was held in a bar.

“Calgary’s council, from its initial meeting in Clarke’s saloon, could never lay claim to tranquility.”

Jeremy Klaszus is founder and editor of The Sprawl.