Several federal Conservative activists in northeast Calgary are criticizing their party after they’d organized and sold memberships for a year or longer in hopes of running in the election, only to watch the party appoint other candidates at the last minute in two key ridings.
There were no incumbent Conservative candidates in the new riding of Calgary McKnight or in Calgary Skyview, the lone city riding the Conservatives lost last election.
That made them hotly coveted among several local party activists and experienced politicians — but some of them are publicly expressing frustration that the party chose candidates without holding nomination contests.
And they wonder whether it will motivate the swaths of northeast voters they’d courted to refuse to support the Conservatives.
“I think this is not a fair way of treating a loyal member of your party, the person who is selling thousands of memberships, the person who’s trying to make sure he can secure the seat for the party in the next election,” said Naeem Chaudhry, a taxi company owner who’d hoped to run in McKnight against Liberal candidate George Chahal.
As The Hill Times reported earlier this week, Chaudhry and Ranvir Parmar both say they had been preparing their campaigns since late 2023, and formally applied last summer to be nomination contestants for the new Calgary riding. But in early March, both received letters from a party official that their applications were incomplete and they were therefore ineligible to run.
Neither received specifics about the problems with their candidate papers. Nor were they allowed to appeal.
“I don’t know what’s going on behind the doors, but there’s no transparency,” Parmar told CBC News.
Dalwinder Gill, a real estate agent, was named to carry the Conservative banner in McKnight on March 23, the eve of the election call. So was Amanpreet Singh Gill (no relation) in Calgary Skyview.
In that riding, at least eight candidates had been door-knocking, holding fundraisers and selling memberships in hopes of winning the nomination. They include Jag Sahota, who was Skyview’s MP from 2019 to 2021, and Josephine Pon, a former provincial MLA and cabinet minister for the UCP.
Conservative hopefuls waited for several months for the party to schedule a nomination race, but that never happened. They learned that Amanpreet Singh Gill was being appointed shortly before the news became public.
Kamran Chaudhry (no relation to Naeem), who was also seeking the Skyview slot, criticized the party for appointing somebody who he says hadn’t done any visible campaigning in the riding until his late-March announcement as the candidate.
“Right now, we’re all just shocked. We put a lot of time and effort into this.”
Tanveer Taj had also been seeking the Skyview nomination since September.
“It was just truly bizarre,” he said. “There’s no clarity, there’s no transparency, no democracy within the party at all.”
Gill, the Conservatives’ Skyview candidate, ran unsuccessfully for the United Conservatives in the 2023 Alberta election in a northeast Calgary riding. Donor records also show that he donated $1,415 to the federal Liberals in 2022, the year Pierre Poilievre became Conservative leader.
The Skyview candidate did not reply to a request for comment. Nor did the Conservative Party.
Chahal won Calgary Skyview for the Liberals by fewer than 3,000 votes in 2021. He is now running in the new riding of Calgary McKnight, which was created from parts of Calgary Skyview and Calgary Forest Lawn during the electoral district redistribution that followed the release of the 2021 census.
The would-be Conservative candidates whose organizing efforts proved futile now wonder if all those thousands of northeast Calgarians who bought memberships to vote in the nomination will now turn against the party.
Parmar says many are “pretty upset” and now “they want to go the other way, to the Liberal side.”
As for Parmar’s own intentions? “I’m not supporting anyone right now. Just sitting home.”
His former McKnight rival Naeem Chaudhry says it will be hard to convince his supporters, and he expects many will just stay home and not vote.
“They just want to show their disagreement with the decision the party has made.”
But Skyview’s Kamran Chaudhry doesn’t expect this to factor into results.
“The average voter doesn’t know the inner workings of the parties,” he said. “Their interest is ideology and where the party is going to take them.”
Based on the past election’s results and polls showing the Liberals resurgent nationally, these two ridings might be some of the toughest for the Conservatives to win, says one of the sidelined candidates.
“To be honest, it’s slim,” Parmar said. “It was always a tight riding, and now this happened.”
The Conservatives’ candidate recruitment practices have sown discord in other parts of the country, as well. Mike de Jong, a former B.C. finance minister, was rejected as a Conservative candidate in a Fraser Valley riding in favour of an area farmer. De Jong is running for the seat as an independent candidate.
