As Calgary goes to the polls today, it's important to know the mostly untold history behind our last council. It was dominated by the so-called Hateful 8 councillors, with Mayor Gondek making 9. They earned their name by voting as a block for issues they never campaigned on, such as the climate emergency and the hugely unpopular blanket rezoning, just to name two.Hundreds of thousands of voters asked why their wishes were disregarded? Through Freedom of Information, CBC investigative reporter Scott Dippel published 2 articles in 2024 on third-party advertiser (TPA) spending in the last civic election. He exposed that one TPA, Calgary's Future, spent $1.8 million to run Facebook ads on behalf of 13 councillors and Mayor Gondek. This is more than the other 20 plus TPA's spent in total. The Hateful Eight and Mayor Gondek were all winners.What Dippel exposed is that Calgary's Future is funded by 6 CUPE locals from Calgary and other Alberta cities. Over the past 4 years, if you checked the Calgary's Future website, the issues that it advocated for were often what the Hateful Eight voted for, and presumably good for funder CUPE.Ask yourself, even if Calgary's Future exerted no influence on voting, did the Hateful Eight councillors feel some obligation towards Calgary's Future and its CUPE funders for giving them a massive advertising advantage over other candidates? I hope not.If you go to the Calgary's Future website right now, you can see which candidates they are endorsing in each riding. By Riding they are: Mayor Gondek, 1 Nowak, 2 Lam, 3 Sandhu, 4 Dhaliwal, 5 Khan, 6 Walcott, 7 Peigan, 8 Moser, 9 Paredes, 10 Woo-Paw, 11 Branagan, 12 Ferguson, 13 Weinstein.Don Thompson
