Tank: Block’s support for mayor came from throughout Saskatoon

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Saskatoon Mayor Cynthia Block’s victory last month stands out as the most impressive triumph for a new mayor in nearly half a century.

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You would need to dial back to 1976 — an era remembered for crippling inflation, another Trudeau as Canadian prime minister and a 38-year-old quarterback slinging footballs for the Saskatchewan Roughriders — to find the last time a Saskatoon mayor got elected for the first time with a larger share of the vote than Block got.

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Forty-eight years ago, incumbent veteran alderman Cliff Wright won 73 per cent of the vote over university personnel officer and political newcomer Bruce McCorkell in a rare two-candidate race.

Last month, Block won the Saskatoon mayor’s chair with 44 per cent of the vote against two well-known challengers, former provincial cabinet minister Gord Wyant (29 per cent) and former mayor Don Atchison (15 per cent).

That’s a higher vote share than the first mayoral victories for Charlie Clark (41 per cent in 2016), Atchison (30 per cent in 2003), Jim Maddin (35 per cent in 2000) and Henry Dayday (40 per cent in 1988).

Block’s 30,412 votes exceeded the 27,377 Clark got four years ago, although the 2020 election turnout was dampened by the COVID-19 pandemic and a snowstorm that postponed the vote. Only 27 per cent of eligible voters cast ballots.

Atchison got the most votes of any Saskatoon mayoral candidate with 38,378 in his landslide victory in 2006. Clark got 32,565 votes in his 2016 win.

Both of those elections also featured higher turnout among eligible voters than the 35 per cent who voted this year, but there’s also more people and more eligible voters in Saskatoon now.

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Yet Block broke through the constraints of her legacy as an inner-city councillor to win support throughout the city, according to the poll-by-poll results. Block won all but 13 of the 69 regular polls, with one tie between her and Wyant. She also topped all except two of the 12 advance polls.

Wyant topped 11 polls and tied one with Block and one with Atchison.

Block finished first in every single poll in Ward 6, which she served for eight years as a councillor, but also topped all the polls in Ward 1 and Ward 4, a suburban west-side district.

In wards 7, 8, 9 and 10, all of which include suburbans areas, Block only lost one poll to Wyant, although the two also tied a poll in Ward 9. Block failed to win two polls in Ward 2, including an oddball one where only 54 votes were cast and she finished fourth with Wyant and Atchison tied for first.

Block also placed third in one poll in Ward 3 and second in the poll at Fairhaven School, which is the closest voting location to the controversial provincial homeless shelter run by the Saskatoon Tribal Council.

While some tried to portray the shelter as a city hall issue instead of a provincial problem, fewer than 20 per cent of eligible voters cast ballots at Fairhaven School (although these results may be skewed somewhat due to more advance voting options and so-called super polls, where anyone could vote).

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Only in Ward 5, which Wyant once represented as a city councillor and which includes part of the area he served as an MLA, did the former Saskatchewan Party politician win the most polls with four of six.

It also appears that the two acclamations — Bev Dubois in Ward 9 and Zach Jeffries in Ward 10 — suppressed voter turnout in these areas. At the largest poll in these two wards, less than 14 per cent of the 6,275 eligible voters cast ballots.

Four years ago, Clark won all but six of the 65 polls and all of the advance polls. Rob Norris, another former Saskatchewan Party cabinet minister, topped the others in 2020.

But in Clark’s first run at the mayor’s job in 2016 after 10 years as a councillor, he won 41 out of 62 polling stations; Atchison claimed the top spot in the other 21. For the second straight election, Atchison failed to win a single poll outright.

Block became the 12th woman to run for mayor — although Donna Birkmaier and Lenore Swystun each ran twice — a journey that began with Bernice Norman in 1968.

And voters from east to west and north to south showed their support for the most dramatic change ever in the Saskatoon mayor’s office.

Phil Tank is the digital opinion editor at the Saskatoon StarPhoenix.

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