Incumbent mayoral candidate Jyoti Gondek wants to see a new council and a new Calgary through a second term.
Gondek is putting her faith in Calgary’s future and emphasizing the importance of voting and the youth community in shaping future leadership.
The Calgary politician also thinks showing vulnerability is incredibly important, conceding she’s made mistakes but has learned from them in the city’s top job.
Gondek’s campaign addresses many issues that face Calgarians, such as affordability, public safety, and the consistent supply of trusted services. She says she’s ready to lead a new council and build on her primary foundational work to achieve further success.
More about Jyoti Gondek:
X: @JyotiGondek
Instagram: @jyotigondek
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jyotigondek/
7+ questions with Jyoti Gondek
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Bella Coco: Why are you running for reelection?
Jyoti Gondek: It’s been a tremendous privilege to represent Calgarians over the last four years. I wake up every morning just feeling so privileged that I get to do this job and so grateful that I get this opportunity to serve. We have spent four years as a council doing some really big foundational work, everything from creating the best housing strategy in the nation to ensuring that we have focused on public safety and growing our economy. With that foundational work done, I would really like to see it through for the next four years. So for me, right now, it’s about stability and predictability for Calgarians. We are going to see a very large turnover on council this time around, and I want to make sure there’s some institutional knowledge and someone with experience at the helm.
What are the most pressing issues for you right now as a returning mayoral candidate?
There are several things that are important to Calgarians. And so, people have talked about public safety and wanting to feel safe on transit in their communities and downtown. People have been talking about affordability and how important it is that they can find a good place to live, which allows them to live with dignity while they can afford it as well. People want to make sure that we’ve got jobs available to them. So it’s not just a single priority that I have to be looking at. Calgarians have complex lives, and they have so much going on, and I think it’s important to be able to focus on how all those things fit together. We’re making sure you’re getting your trusted services, your water is turning on, you are able to flush your toilet, you are able to put your trash out and know that it’s going to get picked up, and your roads are in good repair. Ensuring transit is available. Those are the core things we need to be doing. But in addition to that, we need to make sure that we are making strong investments that let other investors know that the City of Calgary is on the upturn, that we are the place that you want to be investing. We’ve seen it with $15 billion worth of construction projects on the go for the next three to five years, and that translates to jobs for people. It’s a signal of confidence in this market. We need to be actively focused on the trusted services that we know we have to provide to you, but also how we are going to grow our city so that everyone has an opportunity.
As a potential returning mayor, how are you going to appeal to and meet the needs of young people in the city?
I have an incredible opportunity to meet with young people on a regular basis. There’s the Mayor’s Youth Council, so I get to have meetings with them once a quarter and find out what’s important to students who are in high school. A lot of them have really great ideas, and they’re doing good work. If I can just give you one example, this past year, they did a survey and research on why kids are vaping and what it would take for them to quit. It was tremendous research. It was methodologically sound. The findings were great, and I asked them if they wanted to do a press conference on it. And there were a lot of nerves at the beginning, but they came and did a full presser. Everyone from the media attended, asked them some great questions, and we were able to profile that. High school students are understanding what the issues are and digging into how we can make things better. So that was a big win for the student community, and then the opportunity to engage with folks like you and to be able to come to post-secondary institutions into the classrooms, into your mixers, and just find out what’s going on. All of you have told us very clearly that affordability is something that is a serious concern for you, especially finding a place that you can live in that doesn’t wipe you out in terms of your finances, so that you can still eat, and you can still pursue your studies. Those things are top of mind to you. And for that reason, they’re top of mind for me.
I’m 20 years old. What do you think a big city mayor did when you were my age?
Oh my goodness. When I was 20…so I lived in Brandon, Manitoba, for junior high and high school, and I was 19 when I left there to go to UBC; to go to the big city. I don’t think I ever really paid a lot of attention to what the mayor does. I remember we would have things that went on in the city, like in Calgary. There was something called the Pickle Festival, and there were always the summer and winter fairs, and you would hear about the mayor being there. I don’t know that I connected the dots on that person being the one who’s responsible for your trusted services reaching you every day. So at 20, I was not as well-informed as you are. I certainly was not interviewing the mayor for anything, but I’m really encouraged to see that people your age are taking an interest because your city matters so much, and I say ‘your city’ because it is. I don’t want you to feel like someday down the road you’re going to be a leader, you’re leading right now. We need to be listening.
How do you want to see the city prosper in a new term?
Prosperity is something that’s really important for people. When you come to the city, when you choose to live here, whether you were born here and decided to stay or you came from somewhere else like I did, this city should be one where you feel like people will take a chance on you, and that chance will turn into opportunity. And that opportunity will turn into success and prosperity, and prosperity looks different for everyone. But at the very base level, you should be able to afford a home. You should be able to afford to put food on the table. You should have access to a great public education system, and you should be able to enter into recreation programs without any barriers. Those are fundamental. You should be able to traverse through the city in the most economical way possible.
What was your biggest success story during your first term?
Working with this council has been an absolute pleasure. We’ve done so many things that people didn’t think we could accomplish. I would say the housing strategy is probably one of the biggest ones. We created a strategy that has more than 90 action items in it, and we’ve been delivering on it. So, if I can give you an example, because of the strength of that plan, we were able to receive $228 million from the federal government to make sure we could do the things we said we wanted to. Because we performed so well, we received an additional $28 million. It’s going into projects like affordable housing, so we are taking city-owned land and selling it below market value at a much reduced rate to nonprofit housing providers. Seventeen of those sites have already been sold in the non-market land sale. That translates into over 800 units of housing. We also have our downtown conversion strategy. We’re providing an incentive to anyone who’s turning an old office tower into housing. And we have already had 11 projects approved. Three or four of them are finished, and people have moved in. That’s 1500 homes downtown. We’ve also made sure that we are keeping our promises when it comes to reconciliation. So we have the first-ever Indigenous-led housing program, and it’s going to make sure that it’s culturally appropriate. There’s room for smudge and ceremony, but even more importantly, the understanding of what family means. So in some families, there is multi-generational living, and in Indigenous families, we know that to be true. So if there should be the case where a grandmother and a grandchild are sharing a room, that’s culturally acceptable, and there are no conditions around it. It’s one, two, and three-bedroom homes, and it’s making sure that you understand who the caregivers will be in that scenario. Again, we’re just trying to be respectful of having this be Indigenous-led. We’ve also provided incentives for secondary suites so that students and newcomers in particular can access them, and affordable rental housing as quickly as possible. There are all kinds of moves that we’ve made when it comes to housing, and I’m very proud of the work council did in collaborating with each other to get that done.
What was your biggest learning opportunity during your term?
I would say there’s so much to learn in a job as big as this. I took every opportunity to learn from people both within council, within administration, within the business community, the student community, and our social service providers. It’s that larger scope of learning that matters so much, because once you realize that you don’t know what you don’t know and you go out into a learning process, you can bring so many other ideas together that you hadn’t even contemplated. It’s my job to be a convener. If I know that you’ve come up with a great idea and it might impact that organization, my job is to connect the two of you to make that happen. That was a great learning opportunity. The other one I would say is communication. For a couple of years, I had my head down. There’s work to do. I was doing it, and I was so focused on getting the work done that I didn’t bring you with me on the journey. I didn’t tell you as much as I could have about what we were doing and why we were doing it. And the moment that the water feeder main broke last year was that sort of TSN turning point of realizing that I needed to step up the game on communication because nobody else was doing it. The feeder main broke on a Wednesday. I waited for a couple of days for our teams to get communication together, and there’s this tendency that your communication should be fully and completely done. I don’t agree with that, especially not in a crisis situation like that. You need to get out in front of people and tell them what you know so that people aren’t thinking the worst. So that’s why I started coming into your living rooms, every day, twice a day, and telling you what I knew and asking you to flush the toilet one less time, or explaining to you what the magnitude of the crisis was. So I’ve learned to be a better communicator, and it’s a lesson that I have taken to heart and improved all the ways that I get messaging out to Calgarians.
A lot of politicians don’t tend to own up to mistakes in the past or talk about learning opportunities. Why do you think you tend to do that?
I don’t think that anyone buys the argument that a person can be perfect, so why even try to do that? I think it’s actually a little bit more real. I think showing vulnerability is incredibly important. I do it because it matters. I need to be honest with you, right? Remember when we were trying to do the single-use items bylaw? We did a spectacularly poor job of communicating that one. We decided in January of one year that we were going to bring it in, and then we spent a whole year not talking to you about it. And then in December, there was this mad panic to tell you that this is what we were going to do, and it was not well understood. For that reason, it became a misinformation campaign. I wish it hadn’t been that way, because all we were trying to do was reduce the amount of trash that was going to our landfills. We were hoping that people would understand that you could divert things to recycling or to composting, but we didn’t handle it well, like not even close.
When you’re not running for reelection, what do you do in your downtime?
Elections can be all-consuming. This one certainly is because we’re trying to get the message out that Calgary is just at the cusp of a whole new chapter of opportunity and prosperity for all of us. You need to get out and vote because it’s so important. So it takes up all of my time. But you know what? I still take the moments to catch up with my mom for a few minutes. I took her to vote yesterday, and so that was 30 minutes I got to spend with her that I typically don’t. Every now and then, if I’m able to catch up with friends for even an hour, it’s a really energizing experience. So I try to do that, and I try to make sure I get enough sleep because I would not be able to provide you with the type of public service you need if I weren’t getting some rest. So, try to catch up on my sleep, try to stay active, and then there’s just all the things to do.
Is there anything you’d like to add before we wrap up?
The only thing I will add is I appreciate so much the fact that you are doing this. To see students engaged in this municipal election is incredibly heartwarming, and it’s critical.
Watch video of Calgary Journal reporter Bella Coco speaking with Jyoti Gondek.
This video has been edited for length and clarity.
