[kermitology]

I attended the Calgary Mountain View candidate forum on Friday night. It was really well done in format with a quick fire section that asked for a yes or no answer with a sentence to clarify.

Overall impressions:

Alberta Party candidate Angela Kokott was really good. She has a very charming personality, and I think her history in radio was very beneficial. She diverged from the party line on a few things, either because she missed the question or maybe just had a bit more personality.

Alberta Independence Party got a few laughs as the candidate kept saying that we’d be able to pay for everything since we weren’t sending $40B to Ottawa every year. Her answer to most things was that, which she recognized and made light of.

Green Party candidate Thana was awesome. He has a future in politics if he can run under any other banner. He was thoughtful, well spoken and definitely presented some good ideas, but he’s not going to get much support overall. Any other election and I’d probably vote for him.

This is the riding for the former leader of the Liberals and it’s like David Swann wanted Khan to take over for him. He made light of his debate memes joking about how often he takes about being a Constitutional and Native affairs lawyer, and laying pipe. He didn’t show well. He kept going over his time and not answering things well. He and Thana were vibing with each other as he kept agreeing with and reenforcing what Thana had to say.

NDP Kathleen Ganley was well spoken, and seemed to have a lot of support from the room. She started off strong, but eventually drifted into making veiled statements about what the UCP would do. Overall, she didn’t perform particularly well, but did give some good answers.

UCP was Jeremy Wong and I don’t think he had a lot of support in the room. He waffled on a bunch of questions, especially the yes or no, and that made the crowd a visibly annoyed. He took several swipes at the NDP and made a couple of factual errors in his attacks on the NDP. In particular, he seemed to be pandering for votes, like when being asked about cuts to education or healthcare, he said no, that funding levels would be held or raised, but I’m not sure how that’s possible with the proposed tax cuts and cutting deficit spending.

Overall, the forum was really well attended, there was standing room only, and I think the forum gave a lot for people to think about. The candidates were all very respectful, and you got a chance to learn a lot about who they were. This was so much better than the leaders debate, which I thought was useless and served very little purpose.

I left the forum hopeful for the Alberta Party. If I was to guess based on the room and the lawn signs, were going to have a split riding with one party taking it with like 35% of the vote. Which sucks, because I think that the split will really upset most of the riding.