Chima Nkemdirim On Politics

40-year-old Chims Nkemdirim has been called one of the savviest political minds in Calgary and was one of the key architects behind the election campaign strategy that took Naheed Nenshi from a longshot candidate to becoming Calgary’s mayor.

In November 2010, he took a pay cut and resigned from a job he’d had for 13 years as a securities lawyer and partner with Fraser Milner Casgrain to become Nenshi’s chief of staff; he now acts as a senior advisor to the mayor and helps to lobby city council for support on key issues; he met Nenshi when they were first-year students at the University of Calgary and they’ve been buddies ever since.

— “When we decided to run in the election, I remember saying to Naheed that I’d only do it if we were running to win. We had run Naheed before as an aldermanic candidate and we made every mistake in the book. This time, we knew we needed a strategy to win, even though we didn’t have the money or support that our competitors had.”

— “The strategy was tied to an old approach. It was basically a word-of-mouth campaign. We knew we had the best candidate and that if people met him and heard him speak they’d likely support him. We wanted to make sure he met people who were connectors in the city who would go on and tell their friends. The campaign was based on the idea of a tipping point. Get all these connectors together, get them all supporting our guy and they’ll tell five people, who’ll go on and tell five more people.”  

— “We put on coffee parties so people could meet and talk with Naheed. At the beginning of the campaign, three or four people would show up. By the end, in an average-size house, we had people standing on the lawn.”  

— “We also realized that lots of these connected people were online. We used Facebook and Twitter to have conversations with them. Naheed loves technology and has been tweeting for ages. The people who followed the municipal hash tag on Twitter were the same ones who told five friends who they should vote for.”

— “If you use Twitter, you can tell right away if it’s a real person or some staffer. Naheed really likes communicating online, so it was actually him tweeting and not Campaign Staffer No. 6.”

— “We knew that everyone who won a U.S. election had the most Facebook friends. In Calgary, there are about 660,000 people on Facebook, so it isn’t just 18-year-olds. The interesting thing with Facebook is that you see what your friends ‘like.’ That makes a huge difference. It’s like a personal endorsement from your friends.”

— “The move to municipal politics has taken some adjustment. As a lawyer, I used to produce documents for clients. That was my job. No one ever wanted to have long meetings with me because I billed in six-minute increments. Here, everyone wants to have meetings with me and they’ll take up my entire day if I let them."

— “Every member of city council has a different agenda. When lobbying for support, you have to try to understand what that agenda is to see if it matches with your own. That can be very challenging. It’s not always clear what that agenda is.”

— “Politics is about the ability to effect change. Sometimes that takes time. An example is secondary suites. These basement suites in existing dwellings have been legalized across the country, except in Calgary. Calgarians overwhelmingly support it with something like 70 to 80 per cent wanting them in their neighbourhoods. But it has been incredibly difficult to get enough support on city council even though the people want it.”

— “There are some aldermen who think their community associations put a lot of pressure on them to say that they don’t want basement suites in their communities. I think a lot of community associations are filled with not-in-my-backyard type of people, and they haven’t actually gone out and talked to the residents in their community. How can it be that polls show such strong support, but apparently no community association is in favour of it? There’s a real disconnect there."

— “A good politician should say what they believe. They should listen to what the people are saying, think about it and then state very clearly: ‘I think we should do this, and here are the reasons why.’ At the same time, they should be willing to change their mind if a better argument comes along.”

— “A lot of politicians are too focused on keeping their job when they should really be looking at doing the best job they can. Leave it up to the people as to whether or not you should stay. If the public isn’t willing to support you, you should be willing to lose your seat.”