Ward 7: The candidates, demographics and mood of voters

Ward 7includes downtown and many inner-city communities to the north and west, up to and including the University of Calgary.

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

• Scroll down for a list of candidates

Just over 84,000 people live in the ward, making it smaller than average, in terms of population.

They live in about 44,500 homes, roughly half of which (52 per cent) are apartments or apartment-style condominiums.

Ward 7debates

Ward 7candidates took part in a debate on Sunday, Sept. 26, organized by the Montgomery Community Association.

You can watch video of the debate here, via Zoom replay, at the link below by using the password:2@h&V#mf

• Ward 7Streaming live from Sept. 26

Candidates also took place in another debate on Wednesday, Sept. 29, organized by a group of 16 community associationsin the ward.

You can watch video from that debate, via YouTube, here:

• Ward 7 Streaming live from Sept. 29

Are you organizing or planning to attend another forum or debate in the future?

Let us know about it! Please email: calgarynewstips@cbc.ca with the details.

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, although these results come with a higher margin of error due to the smaller number of respondents.

• More details about the poll's methodology can be found at the end of this article

Respondents were asked to rank the importance of several high-profile and often controversial municipal issues addressed by city council in the past year.

Theresults 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 7responded. (Click on an issue for a recent CBC News story on that topic.)

Ward 7residents 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 7are 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 7are 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.

Citizen satisfaction over time

The City of Calgary also conducts annual surveys of citizen satisfaction.

Taken together over several years, these surveys offera glimpse of how attitudes in each ward have changed over time.

Here's how Ward 7residents' feelings have evolved over the past five years:

Communities in Ward 7

The ward includes the following communities:

• Banff Trail
• Capitol Hill
• Chinatown
• Crescent Heights
• Downtown Commercial Core
• Downtown East Village
• Downtown West End
• Eau Claire
• Hillhurst
• Hounsfield Heights/Briar Hill
• Montgomery
• Mount Pleasant
• Parkdale
• Point Mckay
• Rosedale
• St. Andrews Heights
• Sunnyside
• Tuxedo Park
• University District
• University Heights
• University Of Calgary
• West Hillhurst

Click here to return to the main municipal election page.

Polling details and methodology:

The poll was conducted by Forum Research on behalf of theCanadian Municipal Election Studywith 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 othersubsampleshave 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.

CBCNews is including all of the ward-level data because it represents some of the most detailed ward-level polling done in Calgary to date.

TheCanadian Municipal Election Study also used a statistical techniqueknown as multilevel regression andpost-stratification (MRP) to adjust ward-levelsubsamplesto better match known population characteristics in each ward.

More details about the full poll and methodologycan be found here.

The information at the top of this article about the population and housing mixin each ward comes via the City of Calgary's open data catalogue.