Ward 5: The candidates, demographics and mood of voters

Ward 5 is made up mostly of suburban communities in northeast Calgary.

It has an open race — meaning there is no incumbent city councillor running for re-election.

• Scroll down for a list of candidates

The previous representative for Ward 5, Coun. George Chahal, had initially filed papers to run again but then announced in July he was dropping out of the race to run in the federal election instead.

Nearly 96,000 people live in the ward, making it larger than average, in terms of population.

They live in fewer than 30,000 homes, giving Ward 5 the highest population-to-residence ratio in the city, with an average of 3.2 people per home.

A majority of the homes (60 per cent) are detached, single-family houses.

It's also one of the younger wards in the city, with a majority of residents under the age of 35.

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 — but the results in Ward 5, in particular, should be interpreted with extra caution due to the small number of people in this subsample.

• More details about the poll's methodology can be found below

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 5 responded. (Click on an issue for a recent CBC News story on that topic.)

Ward 5 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 5 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 5 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.

A note about the Ward 5 polling data

With 78 respondents, Ward 5 had the fewest number of people participate in the poll. As a result the margin of error in its results are significantly higher.

"In a city with 14 wards, it's always a challenge to collect large samples from every ward," said Jack Lucas, a political science professor at the University of Calgary and researcher with the Canadian Municipal Election Study, the larger project under which this polling is being done.

"Inevitably, we end up with one or two wards with fewer respondents than we'd like."

In a perfect polling world, he said, every ward would have many more respondents. But surveys of that size in a single city are impractical and cost-prohibitive.

"Even if our sample sizes in some wards are small, I think it's vital to share the data we've collected with Calgarians in every ward, so everyone has access to information about their communities," Lucas said.

"Over the past 10 or 15 years, statisticians and social scientists have developed new tools that allow us to make quite good public opinion estimates in smaller geographic areas, like wards, even with relatively small sample sizes."

"I always recommend that people interpret survey results with caution, and it's especially important never to over-interpret small differences between wards, differences that would certainly be within the survey's margin of error," Lucas added.

"But I'm also really excited about the opportunity that these new statistical techniques are giving us to provide people with information about their local communities that might not otherwise have been 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 5 residents' feelings have evolved over the past five years: 

Communities in Ward 5

The ward includes the following communities:

• Castleridge
• Cityscape
• Cornerstone
• Falconridge
• Homestead
• Martindale
• Redstone
• Saddle Ridge
• Skyview Ranch
• Taradale

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.