The new face of Calgary

Who's a redneck now ? Calgarians ask after electing a Muslim mayor




BY LICIA CORBELLA




"Calgary's redneck image has been impaled!" enthused Jordy, a reader who emailed me this week.

"Now maybe Torontonians will stop thinking of us as Neanderthals," wrote another.

Dream on, says I.

These writers believe now that Calgarians voted in Naheed Nenshi as our new mayor, suddenly the "East's" view of Albertans as hayseed bigots will somehow evaporate like hardened snow in a chinook, and Calgary and Alberta will be given due credit as the most egalitarian, fresh-thinking jurisdictions in Canada.

History, however, shows that despite the many sexist and racist laws and taboos westerners have knocked down against the wishes of "easterners" the unfair stereotype sticks like bull-poop on Alberta boots.

Yes, it's true Nenshi, an associate business professor at Mount Royal University and former Calgary Herald columnist, is the first Muslim mayor of a major Canadian city. It's also true that with the exception of a few news reports his race, religion and colour never became issues. Calgarians are so past that.

Liberal blogger Dan Arnold wrote on the National Post's online blog, Full Comment, last week, that enduring Calgary-Toronto stereotypes have been turned "topsy-turvy." After all, according to polls, Torontonians are seriously considering voting for Etobicoke city councillor Rob Ford as mayor on Oct. 25 even though this portly university dropout "wants to limit immigration, says 'Oriental people work like dogs,' and has a record of dubious behaviour that would make Ralph Klein blush," wrote Arnold.

In contrast, Nenshi, 38, who holds a bachelor of commerce degree from the University of Calgary and a master's degree in public policy from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, was the chairman of the Epcor Centre for the Performing Arts and has written Building Up: Making Canada's Cities Magnets for Talent and Engines of Development, a book on improving Canadian cities.

As someone who grew up in Vancouver, lived in Toronto, and has now lived in Calgary for almost two decades, I learned something very quickly. Albertans are among the most egalitarian, colour-blind, fair-minded people in the country, if not the world. For some reason, it's a well-kept secret.

Many easterners will sniff, right about now, as they rush off to pick up their kids from their Montessori preschool, with their low-fat soy latte in hand. But there is proof and here's just some of it:

Alex Decoteau became Canada's first aboriginal police officer in 1911 when he was hired by the Edmonton police, and just one year later, Annie May Jackson from Edmonton became Canada's first female police officer.

Early in 1916, Manitoba became the first province in Canada to give women the vote, followed quickly by Saskatchewan, Alberta, and British Columbia. Quebec didn't grant women the vote until 1940.

In 1916, Emily Murphy of Edmonton became not just the first female magistrate in Canada, but in the entire British Empire. Albertans Louise Mc-Kinney and Roberta MacAdams were the first women to be elected to legislature seats, in 1917. So, while all those wannabe blue-bloods in Ontario were fighting hard to keep their lips stiff and their women down, so-called redneck Alberta men were electing them to write their laws, and appointing them to the bench.

Murphy's appointment was quickly challenged because women were not considered persons under the BNA Act. Eventually, Murphy, along with four other women -- Henrietta Muir Edwards, Nellie McClung, McKinney and Irene Parlby -now known as the Famous 5 -organized petitions to have women declared persons. After the Supreme Court of Canada said "no," the five women appealed that decision to the Privy Council in England and on Oct. 18, 1929, (exactly 81 years to the day before Nenshi's election) it ruled that "yes, women are persons ... and may become members of the Senate of Canada."

And the list goes on and on. It was Calgary that became the first major Canadian city to appoint a woman as police chief, etc.

In Alberta, people don't ask, "Who's your daddy?" and people don't make a point of telling you what posh private boarding school they attended within five minutes of meeting you, as they do "out East." Do you work hard and is your word your bond? That's the ticket in Alberta. That, and good policy and ideas. It's why Preston Manning's Reform was born in the West and how the Ralph Klein revolution led the way for the rest of Canada to start balancing the books.

Frankly, Calgary has never had a redneck mayor as far as history books go. Dave Bronconnier, whose three-term reign as mayor officially ends next Monday, ran in a federal election as a Liberal (and lost), and yet he never broke our redneck image. Before him was Al Duerr, a mild-mannered man who can speak some Mandarin, thanks to help from his wife, Kit Chan, and yet he never managed to break the East's biased stereotype of Calgary.

Can the articulate son of middle-class immigrants from Tanzania with a Harvard degree who gets excited when he talks about building "complete communities" be able to shake Calgary's redneck image?

Don't bet the herd.

Licia Corbella is the editorial-page editor of the Calgary Herald.