Damn Canadian Rednecks LOL
Canada's Third-Largest City Elects a Muslim Mayor
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(Oct. 19) -- A 38-year-old business professor and self-professed Twitter geek who used social media to spread his political message has been elected mayor of Calgary, becoming the first-ever Muslim to lead a major Canadian city.
Naheed Nenshi defeated longtime Calgary alderman Ric McIver on Monday night. He ran on promises to reel in a misspending city council, and appealed to voters of all stripes through social media and with his personal story of growing up as a second-generation, working-class immigrant. His campaign brochures were translated into 10 languages.
"My parents were 30 when they came to this country. She was pregnant with me. They never had a thing," Nenshi told the Calgary Herald. "I bet you they never imagined their loudmouthed kid would be standing here today."
Nenshi drew votes via his Twitter, Facebook and Web-based political campaign, in what The Vancouver Sun described as "stealing a page out of Barack Obama's playbook." He even designed an iPhone app for his supporters.
Aside from his social media push, Nenshi also became famous in Calgary for his "purple army" -- supporters donning purple campaign T-shirts.
"You know the purple army was never about winning an election. It's a good thing, but it was about revitalizing the public conversation in this city," Nenshi told supporters at a victory party last night, according to The Chronicle Herald.
"It was about talking to the person next to you on the bus. It was about taking an extra minute with the cashier at Safeway. And now it is about doing the work to build that better Calgary that we all need so badly," he said.
Nenshi's religion didn't factor into the political race until last month, when someone threw a brick through the window of his campaign headquarters. At the time, he said he'd been receiving e-mails from people suggesting the public should be scared of a Muslim mayor.
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"I don't shy away from the color of my skin, I don't shy away from my faith, I don't shy away from my background or my education or my experience," Nenshi told CBC News. "All of that is part of the crazy mix that makes up Naheed, and all of it is part of the crazy mix that makes up Calgary."
Calgary is Canada's third largest municipality and has been growing in recent decades at a blistering pace. Still, the new mayor has a tough job ahead of him. Like many U.S. and Canadian cities, Calgary is barely emerging from a recession, and faces a $60 million budget shortfall and a 6.7 percent tax increase, the Calgary Herald reported.
The new mayor has never held political office before, and his former opponent, McIver, had argued that the city's relatively dire financial situation means that it's "no time for on-the-job training" in the mayor's office. But Nenshi has a master's degree in public policy from Harvard, runs a consulting firm and teaches nonprofit management at Calgary's Mount Royal University. |
