The "Rednecks" in Calgary Elect a Muslim Mayor

Newly Elected Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi.. 

Future candidates.. ignore technology at your peril..

Well.

"Rednecks" in Alberta just elected Canada's first Muslim mayor in a major city.

Dark horse candidate Naheed Nenshi came from behind in pre-election polls and succeeded in overcoming favorites Barb Higgens and Ric McIver.

This bodes well for Calgary, and, I think, for small "c" conservatives in Canada.. though not necessarily for big "C" conservatives.

Why?

Well, ignoring partisan politics for a moment, it sends a pretty clear message to the rest of Canada that Albertans have known for a long time.

That what matters in this Province is not the color of one's skin, but the effort they are willing to make.  Nenshi is the son of immigrants from Tanzania. He was born in Toronto but his family moved to Calgary when he was young. Educated at Harvard, Nenshi worked for many years as a business consultant before becoming a professor at Mount Royal University.  As reported in the National Post today:

He sang from Alberta’s fiscally conservative song sheet, insisting that “people deserve to feel burned because our city council has burned them. It has thrown money away. It is a city council that has forgotten why they are there.” And thundered populism as well as any Tea Partier when he vowed he would “stand up to the forces arrayed against helping people get better lives.”

While Nenshi may have risen to academia, he came from very humble roots, being the child of hard-working immigrant parents, and it appears he did not forget where he came from, being quoted as saying “I know how to talk to the guy in the muffler shop because he’s my cousin.”

This is the conservative credo.  That success is not a "gift" from government, and that it arises from hard work and personal sacrifice.  That government taking our tax dollars should consider those funds a trust for the taxpayer - not a personal entitlement, a la Adscam and, to be fair, the multi-partisan waste of Canadian tax dollars used to buy votes in Quebec.

This doesn't, necessarily, however bode well for the large "C" conservatives, Provincially or Federally.  The taxpayers want responsible use of their tax dollars, and there are questions in taxpayers minds in Alberta and in Canada regarding just how conservatively they are being managed.

It's an odd thing - but in this time of financial stress for many Canadians, we see that people all over the social spectrum have an inherent understanding that in times of recession, proper budgeting is critical.

We have seen the dive in the polls of Barack Obama, primarily related I would suggest to the image he has gathered as a person more concerned with "ideas" than pragmatic realism.

The federal Conservatives in particular would be wise to take notice.  Their "ideas", whether discarding the long-gun registry, building more jails to put more people away, or scrapping the long-form census will not hold a candle, at the end of the day, to the fears of financial mismanagement.

The Liberals are starting to get it.  Talk is that they are shelving the national daycare program in favor of a commitment to balance the budget quicker than the Conservatives.

Then again, they promised to repeal GST.

And the last time they balanced a budget it was on the backs of the Provinces.. smiling at their bottom line, while heaping scorn on Provinces seeking a "third way" to balance their growing health care budgets when the Feds squeezed their funding down (except in Quebec).

I think it also goes without saying that it might be just a little more difficult for hard-line Muslim clerics to suggest that there is no place for moderate Muslims in Canadian society.

And that's a good thing.

Well done, Naheed Nenshi.