Obviously we all know that wealth doesn\u2019t guarantee wins \u2014 sometimes it can even be seen as a vice \u2014 but usually there is a reasonably strong correlation<\/a>, as money can buy a lot of ads, name recognition and sophisticated campaign help. That\u2019s\u00a0typically been the pattern in Edmonton\u2019s mayoral contests,\u00a0in which the candidate with\u00a0the most bread gets the benefit.<\/p>\n Except that didn\u2019t happen last fall, when the campaign that spent by far the most was defeated by a Knack campaign that had less than one-sixth of the resources.<\/p>\n I\u2019ll save the Cinderella or David vs. Goliath references. But it\u2019s fair to say that we don\u2019t often see disparities that wide, and it is worth digging into a little further.<\/p>\n Andrew Knack, then a mayoral candidate, holds a news conference in June 2025 outside city hall in Edmonton.<\/p>\n Lean and not-so-lean campaigns<\/p>\n Recently released disclosure statements by Edmonton Elections<\/a> show that Knack\u00a0raised and spent just over $240,000 on his campaign, mostly funded by a\u00a0lot of relatively small-ish\u00a0donations\u00a0from individuals, including\u00a0several\u00a0from the city\u2019s NDP-affiliated crowd.<\/p>\n That tab ranked third in the race, behind Michael Walters\u2019 spending of $346,000 and way, way back of Tim Cartmell,<\/a> who I\u2019ll get to in a moment.<\/p>\n For context, Knack also spent barely 35 per cent of the $675,000 that Amarjeet Sohi spent to win the 2021 election.<\/p>\n Perhaps he wished to raise and spend more, but that\u2019s all he ended up getting and all he ended up needing. Victory cost a minuscule $3 per vote at a time when $3 doesn\u2019t seem to buy much of anything anymore.<\/p>\n As for Cartmell<\/a>, who was organizing and campaigning well before any of the other contenders, he spent $812,500 in 2025 and around $136,000 in 2024. That adds up to a total of $948,500, which is more than the other 12 mayoral candidates combined. It is undoubtedly the most expensive race ever run in an Edmonton civic election.<\/p>\n To put things in\u00a0even\u00a0sharper\u00a0perspective,\u00a0Cartmell\u2019s\u00a0advertising budget<\/a> alone was\u00a0higher\u00a0than Knack\u2019s entire campaign.\u00a0In the bang-for-buck calculation, if you care about that sort of thing, Cartmell\u00a0ended\u00a0up spending\u00a0about $15.38 per vote.<\/p>\n And that doesn\u2019t include any spending of his party, Better Edmonton<\/a>.<\/p>\n The disclosure statements<\/a> show the party brought in about $371,000 and spent about $530,000. The disparity seems to have been mostly covered by a post-election net transfer of $121,000 from Cartmell\u2019s own campaign war chest, though the party was still left with a $38,000 deficit at the end of the year.<\/p>\n Alberta rules allow parties to spread around their money how they see fit, whether that\u2019s focusing on the mayor\u2019s race, a handful of key council races or the whole city. As such, it\u2019s hard to be precise on how much of Better Edmonton\u2019s expenses directly supported Cartmell, though I think we can safely assume much of it did.<\/p>\n With that\u00a0wrinkle in mind, the combined spending power of Cartmell\u2019s campaign and his party\u2019s added up to\u00a0around $1.48 million.\u00a0That\u2019s\u00a0how we can say that\u00a0Knack won with less than one-sixth of the\u00a0resources\u00a0of his rival.<\/p>\n Edmonton Coun. Karen Principe won her 2025 municipal election race in Ward tastawiyiniwak by spending just $7,900.<\/p>\n How much capital for a council seat?<\/p>\n And it turns out that this incongruence between wealth and winning also played out in many of the council races.<\/p>\n In fact, eight of the city\u2019s 12 wards were won by candidates who were outspent by at least one opponent, including a few who overcame massive financial disparities.<\/p>\n One of the biggest of these was in the southeast\u2019s Ward Sspomitapi, where incumbent Jo-Anne Wright spent just $18,500 and still managed a comfortable victory over Harman Kandola who raised and spent nearly $83,000. Kandola was officially part of the Better Edmonton team, but also distanced himself from the party during the campaign.<\/p>\n Up on the north side, Ward tastawiyiniwak incumbent Karen Principe won easily despite an election tab of just $7,900, well below Fidel Ammar ($17,500) of PACE, and Farhan Chak ($74,200), who finished third and fourth in votes, respectively. Principe represented Better Edmonton, so some of the party\u2019s funds may have gone to help her, but her personal campaign expenses were by far the lowest of any winner.<\/p>\n Next door in Ward Dene, council veteran Aaron Paquette\u00a0($32,300) won over his Better Edmonton rival Banisha Sandhu, who spent\u00a0two and a half times\u00a0as\u00a0much ($80,700).\u00a0Anne\u00a0Stevenson\u00a0won re-election in central O-Day\u2019min\u00a0despite two\u00a0challengers\u00a0spending\u00a0more.<\/p>\n Edmonton city councillors Michael Janz, left, and Jon Morgan walk through Chinatown after attending the launch of the 2026 Chinatown Vibrancy Fund on Jan. 13.<\/p>\n And\u00a0it\u00a0wasn\u2019t\u00a0just incumbents who pulled this off.<\/p>\n In the southwest ward of Ipiihkoohkanipiaohtsi, Jon Morgan\u2019s tab of $29,200 was enough to beat a pair of much better-financed rivals \u2014 incumbent Jennifer Rice ($75,000) and third-place finisher Funke Olokude, who spent $70,000 in 2025 and another $18,800 the year before.<\/p>\n Further to the west in Ward sipiwiyiniwak, Thu Parmar ($59,000) eked out a victory over Better Edmonton\u2019s Darrell Friesen ($80,500).<\/p>\n Crazily enough, of the six council candidates who spent at least $74,000 on their campaigns, none of them won.<\/p>\n (Such expenditure levels didn\u2019t happen everywhere. In the central-south ward of papastew, the five candidates combined spent less than $50,000, led by incumbent Michael Janz at $26,100.)<\/p>\n In some ways, the outcome of the fall election remains a bit of a head-scratcher, in that so little turnover occurred despite several signs of a \u201cchange\u201d narrative in the city. While we may never know the hows and whys of that, it is nonetheless gratifying to see that money probably wasn\u2019t one of the explanations, or was at least not definitive to the results.<\/p>\n If anything, wealth may have been a turnoff for some voters in regard to the financial juggernaut that was the Cartmell and Better Edmonton campaign.<\/p>\n That said, one election\u2019s vote dynamics does not change the fact that there remains some real challenges with campaign finance rules \u2014 particularly around transparency, sourcing and limits. Big money and dark money is the subject for Part Two of this column, so stay tuned for that in the days ahead.<\/p>\n kgerein@postmedia.com<\/a><\/p>\n Related<\/p>\n Bookmark our website and support our journalism:\u00a0Don\u2019t miss the news you need to know \u2014 add\u00a0EdmontonJournal.com<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0EdmontonSun.com<\/a>\u00a0to your bookmarks and\u00a0sign up for our newsletters here<\/a>.<\/p>\n You can also support our journalism by becoming a digital subscriber. Subscribers gain unlimited access to The Edmonton Journal, Edmonton Sun, National Post and 13 other Canadian news sites. Support us by subscribing today:\u00a0The Edmonton Journal<\/a>\u00a0|\u00a0The Edmonton Sun<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In elections, as in hockey, they\u00a0don\u2019t\u00a0ask\u00a0how,\u00a0they just ask how many. Campaign game-planning, stick-handling of issues, attack strategies, pressure…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":579936,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[194294],"tags":[99354,49,48,23752,222043,91414,215714,99358,222044],"class_list":{"0":"post-579935","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-edmonton","8":"tag-andrew-knack","9":"tag-ca","10":"tag-canada","11":"tag-edmonton","12":"tag-mayoral-candidates","13":"tag-municipal-election","14":"tag-spending-power","15":"tag-tim-cartmell","16":"tag-ward-sspomitapi"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/579935","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=579935"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/579935\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/579936"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=579935"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=579935"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=579935"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/a852a79213b6435c5ac3d8d33e792fda.jpeg\"\/)
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