Ward 8: The candidates, demographics and mood of voters
Find out who's running for council and how residents are feeling, according to an exclusive poll
Ward 8 is made up of inner-city communities to the south and west of downtown.
It has an open race — meaning there is no incumbent city councillor running for re-election.
- Scroll down for a list of candidates
Nearly 96,000 people live in the ward, making it larger than average, in terms of population.
They live in about 56,000 homes, the majority of which (61 per cent) are apartments or apartment-style condominiums.
Ward 8 debates
Ward 8 candidates have a debate scheduled for Tuesday, Oct. 5.
You can find a live stream of the event here, or watch video of the debate on demand after it happens:
Are you organizing or planning to attend another forum or debate in the future?
Let us know about it! Please email: [email protected] with the details.
Ward-specific poll results
In partnership with the University of Calgary, CBC News conducted a poll in July to find out what Calgarians think about municipal issues.
The poll, conducted by Forum Research, asked more than 2,200 people a series of detailed questions on a wide range of topics.
The sample size was large enough to provide ward-by-ward results, although these results come with a higher margin of error due to the smaller number of respondents.
- More details about the poll's methodology can be found at the end of this article
Respondents were asked to rank the importance of several high-profile — and often controversial — municipal issues addressed by city council in the past year.
The results shown below represent how important people felt an issue was to them, personally, not whether they agree or disagree.
Here's how people in Ward 8 responded. (Click on an issue for a recent CBC News story on that topic.)
Ward 8 residents were also asked how satisfied they were with Calgary's current mayor and city council.
Remember: this poll was conducted in July, so it's a snapshot of voter sentiment at that time.
Residents were asked at the same time about their satisfaction with the provincial government. The results from that question are included here for comparison purposes.
To gauge how people in Ward 8 are feeling about the future of Calgary and their own futures in the city, we also asked them to think about whether they would still be living here in five years' time.
Residents were asked to rate the likelihood that they'd still be living here on a scale from 0 to 100 per cent.
Here's how they responded.
So that's a snapshot of how voters in Ward 8 are feeling.
Next, here are the candidates vying to be the next councillor to represent the ward.
Click on a candidate's name to visit their website or social media page, where available.
Citizen satisfaction over time
The City of Calgary also conducts annual surveys of citizen satisfaction.
Taken together over several years, these surveys offer a glimpse of how attitudes in each ward have changed over time.
Here's how Ward 8 residents' feelings have evolved over the past five years:
Communities in Ward 8
The ward includes the following communities:
- Altadore
- Bankview
- Beltline
- Britannia
- Cliff Bungalow
- Currie Barracks
- Elbow Park
- Elboya
- Erlton
- Garrison Woods
- Killarney/Glengarry
- Lincoln Park
- Lower Mount Royal
- Mission
- Parkhill
- Richmond
- Rideau Park
- Rosscarrock
- Roxboro
- Rutland Park
- Scarboro
- Scarboro/ Sunalta West
- Shaganappi
- South Calgary
- Sunalta
- Upper Mount Royal
Click here to return to the main municipal election page.
Polling details and methodology:
The poll was conducted by Forum Research on behalf of the Canadian Municipal Election Study with the results based on a telephone recruit-to-web survey of 2,209 randomly selected eligible voters in the City of Calgary. The poll was conducted between July 6 and Aug. 4, 2021.
For comparison purposes, the margin of error for a probability sample of the same size would be plus or minus 2.1 percentage points, 19 times out of 20. Results at a ward-level and other subsamples have a larger margin.
The sample sizes in the wards range from as high as 213 in Ward 4 to as low as 78 in Ward 5. As a result, estimates in Ward 5, in particular, should be interpreted with caution as they carry a significantly higher margin of error.
CBC News is including all of the ward-level data because it represents some of the most detailed ward-level polling done in Calgary to date.
The Canadian Municipal Election Study also used a statistical technique known as multilevel regression and post-stratification (MRP) to adjust ward-level subsamples to better match known population characteristics in each ward.
More details about the full poll and methodology can be found here.
The information at the top of this article about the population and housing mix in each ward comes via the City of Calgary's open data catalogue.