How to lose my vote in 4 months

Well, another civic election tomorrow....has it been 3 years since longtime Alderman Ric McIver, CFCN anchor Barb Higgins and some unknown guy named Naheed Nenshi went toe to toe.  I voted for McIver, myself, primarily because of his civic experience.  In hindsight Nenshi probably won BECAUSE of his lack of experience.  He represented change.  Did it mean we could tell everyone who would listen that we were progressive?  Maybe.  It didn't hurt that late in the election he received a surprising endorsement from the Calgary Sun, which undoubtedly played a hand in some voters giving him a listen and liking what they heard.  

Flash forward to June of this year.   A lot of Nenshi's policies got under my (and a lot of people's) skin. I follow him on Twitter and enjoy his "give as good as he gets" approach to hecklers.  I found him an entertaining guy, if not a spectacular mayor.  In June, we had a major flood, and Nenshi did what any leader should do in his position, and, to his credit, he did it right.  He took charge, worked tirelessly, and became a booster of a town that needed one.  By the end of June, just as we were picking up the pieces of our damaged City Centre, Nenshi emerged as a superhero.  Its cynical to assume that Nenshi put on the Superman costume and "saved the day" knowing that an election was looming, but to think it wasn't at least part of it would be naive.  As bad as it sounds, the flood was a terrible day for Calgarians but a great day for the Nenshi administration.  

Even if I call bullshit on some of his heroics(and yes I know I sang his praises at the time as well), that's not what soured me to him.  Hell, he's just doing what any politician would do, and if I were mayor I would probably have done the same.  No, its just a case of one good deed, doesn't cancel out several bad ones.    Riding on a wave of good will here is what our busy mayor has done in 2013:

-Raised property taxes exponentially.   Owning property in Calgary is hard enough, given the volatile market, but if you add unreasonably increased taxes on top of that, you just make more people looking to sell out and move to neighboring towns. 

-Decided for us that keeping the 52 million dollars promised back to us as taxpayers was the right thing to do, given our circumstances.  I would buy that if the end bill of the flood damage is provincial, not civic.  So where is this money going?  Nenshi has officially became that friend who owes you money but constantly makes excuses not to pay it back.   

-After a heated twitter fight (yes, a twitter fight) between Nenshi and Ezra Levant went way too far, Nenshi "just kidding but not really" asked when Levant stopped beating his wife.   I don't care for Ezra Levant, in fact I like Nenshi a lot more than I like him, but that was a lowclass, meanspirited unsubstantiated jab that is inexcusable, especially from the Mayor of the third largest city in Canada.  Domestic violence has always been kind of a berserk button for me, so even jokingly I didn't see the humour in it and I lost a lot of respect for Nenshi over it.  He has since apologized, more that his "good natured jab was taken out of context" than of actually being hurtful to Levant and his family.  

I've heard people compare Nenshi to everyone from Rudy Gulliani to Barack Obama.   To me, he reminds me more of Mayor Quimby from The Simpsons.  Shake your hand with one hand and pick your pocket with the next.  

Kind of ironically enough, the front page story of the Calgary Sun is an article explaining why they do not endorse Nenshi in this election.  I already voted in the Advance Vote, so I didn't need to read the article, but  lets just say the guy who didn't get my vote in 2010 also didn't get it in 2013.