Keith Gerein: Cartmell candidacy puts Edmonton finances in crosshairs

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Welcome to the 2025 Edmonton civic election.

We’re still more than 10 months away from the actual vote of course. But campaigning, which started to emerge in subtle ways in recent months, is about to get a lot more overt — just in time for city budget deliberations and a search for a new police chief.

With apologies to the 18 other Edmontonians who have so far registered to run for city council or school board, the first big shoe to drop in the race came Thursday when Coun. Tim Cartmell made official what has been expected for years.

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The centrist-conservative, two-term councillor from the city’s southwest has announced that he is running to be Mayor Amarjeet Sohi’s successor. Whether Cartmell will have to defeat Sohi for that title is still unclear, and we likely won’t hear the mayor’s intentions until after the city budget debates are concluded next month.

I had wondered if Cartmell, too, might wait to announce until after the budget, because his declaration does potentially change the dynamics of that process. Every speech he makes, and every motion he proposes will now be seen through the lens of his campaign.

But the truth is, there’s not much point in waiting.

Cartmell has been signalling his intentions for a while, perhaps as far back as two years ago when he accepted a spot on an Alberta government task force without council’s consent. And again last spring, when he broke from council to try to end the labour dispute with Civic Service Union 52.

Since then, the political noise around city finances has been cranking up to the point that it is now becoming too loud to ignore.

Those tensions were laid bare in a council discussion last week on setting rules for the coming budget deliberations that ended up in accusations of favouritism, grandstanding and secret cabals.

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Omnibus acrimony

The controversy centred on a process that’s been used the past couple of budgets, in which council allows the mayor to begin the deliberations by making an omnibus motion of various additions and subtractions. That is voted on first and then other council members are allowed to propose their own motions in a randomized order.

The process is designed as a bit of a courtesy to the mayor but also has some expediency to it. Ahead of time, the mayor and his staff meet with individual councillors to hear their ideas for budget improvements. The final omnibus motion is crafted from those discussions, and it supposedly features the most non-controversial changes that have broad support.

However, not everyone sees the process as fair, which is why Cartmell asked council last week to discontinue the mayor’s omnibus privileges and go back to the old system in which council members each get their turn to propose amendments.

Council voted 8-4 to keep the omnibus in place, and the vote split largely on ideological grounds. The four votes on the losing side came from council’s four most conservative councillors — Cartmell, Sarah Hamilton, Jennifer Rice and Karen Principe — the first three of whom told their colleagues that they felt largely excluded in the omnibus preparations.

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Cartmell said it appeared his ideas were given only perfunctory treatment and that he developed a feeling that the mayor and several other councillors had concocted things ahead of time before he was consulted.

This feeling has come up at other times as well, he said, raising the spectre of a pseudo-party system in which a subset of council is “running a behind-the-scenes agenda without the scrutiny of the people we serve.”

That prompted an angry exchange with Coun. Aaron Paquette, who accused Cartmell of “an extraordinary amount of rumour-mongering.”

I know a lot of this is inside baseball to Edmontonians, but it does give a sense of the tone among the group as they get one last chance to fix the finances before the election. The stakes are indeed high.

My own take is that much of Cartmell’s beef simply stems from his frustration at being part of the conservative minority on council — something he is now trying to change through his mayoral run.

The omnibus process has seemed effective, to me, at streamlining budget deliberations but there is also no question that it provides a political advantage to Sohi. That wasn’t a major concern in 2022 and 2023, but it is a more relevant issue heading into an election year.

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Political room on the right

As for Cartmell’s candidacy, I will have more to say in future columns. But the biggest fascination for me is around how he tries to carve out political room between advocating for council to go in a more conservative direction — “safer streets, tough on taxes, and build it better” — while not straying so far conservative as to alienate Edmonton voters unhappy with the UCP government.

Another complication is that the conservative ledger has started to become a bit crowded, with at least two parties springing up and at least two other mayoral contenders in the mix — former city councillor Tony Caterina and former MLA Peter Sandhu. As such, it looks like we’ll start to see some movement to consolidate the right-of-centre vote, and it will be interesting to see where Cartmell emerges in that process.

In that vein, it was a bit surprising to hear that Cartmell plans to form his own party after publicly disparaging the new partisan system installed by the province. And while I wish he would stay completely independent, I understand his change of mind for financial and political reasons.

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The province has rigged the game by giving massive fundraising and spending advantages to partisans over independents, and Cartmell clearly feels he can’t just cede those advantages to his opponents.

Likewise, if he is elected mayor, he is going to need more allies on council to get his agenda through. Forming a party with like-minded candidates — even if it’s just a loose collection of teammates rather than a “mayor and minions” — probably gives him the best chance to do that.

(That said, current councillors who felt they might be able to work with Cartmell may not be thrilled to hear that he is actively recruiting candidates to replace them).

There is still much to shake out over the next 10 months, but Cartmell’s candidacy gets the campaign off and running in a certain direction. It’s now a wait on Sohi to determine the next turn of the race.

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