Andrew Knack elected mayor of Edmonton

Andrew Knack has been elected mayor of Edmonton after a race between two sitting council members.

Source: Facebook

Andrew Knack has been elected mayor of Edmonton after a race between two sitting council members.

As polling had suggested, Knack’s main competitor in Monday’s election was Tim Cartmell, who received 29.61 per cent of the vote. Edmonton’s new mayor surpassed him with 38.09 per cent, remaining ahead of Cartmell throughout the race.

The city said 205,758 of 679,830 eligible voters (30.27 per cent) cast ballots in this year’s election.

Despite polls closing at 8 p.m. on Monday, only 217 of 236 stations have reported as of Wednesday morning.

Despite the lagging results, enough votes have come in to call the race. While Edmonton’s votes are being counted slowly, Calgary had reported and tallied every vote by early Tuesday morning.

However, the vote in Calgary was so close—a difference of 0.16 per cent—that second-place finisher Sonya Sharp has requested a recount.

Thanks to Alberta’s implementation of sweeping changes to local election laws in April 2024, all automated voting equipment, including electronic tabulators, was prohibited in municipal elections, and votes were required to be counted manually.

Some observers have attributed Edmonton’s slow pace in tallying votes to the government’s change. Still, this view is not consistently supported, given that Calgary was able to release its results promptly.

Voter turnout in 2025 was 30.27 per cent, a drop from 37.6 per cent in 2021. This low turnout may be due to reported hour-long wait times at voting stations, prompting some prospective voters to leave.

Edmonton’s election was closer than polls suggested. Knack, a longtime city councillor, led pre-election polling with 41 per cent support among decided voters, ahead of his closest challenger, Tim Cartmell, who had 21 per cent.

During his campaign, Knack supported drug consumption sites, the single-use plastics bylaw, 15-minute cities, bike lanes and other “woke” policies. Now, both Edmonton and Calgary have mayors who supported “woke” ideology in their campaigns.

Some of Knack’s supported policies, such as bike lanes and the single-use plastics bylaw, were only supported by Knack among the top candidates during a Q&A.

Some of Knack’s funding pledges, like harm prevention, drew criticism from other candidates.

“I’ll be a strong advocate here for provincial support, but we cannot put more taxpayer money towards this; Edmontonians are stretched too thin. A Knack government will increase your taxes for this issue,” said Cartmell.

Edmontonians largely re-elected their city councillors. Both Knack and Cartmell resigned their council seats to run for mayor. Apart from them, only one city councillor running for re-election was defeated. Eight other councillors were re-elected, and one incumbent did not seek re-election.

While Cartmell lost the mayoral race, four councillors from the political party he led were elected.

This year’s municipal elections were the first in Alberta to allow candidates to appear on the ballot with political parties (which are legally required to have no affiliation with provincial or federal parties). Edmonton’s election featured two political parties: Better Edmonton and PACE (Principled Accountable Coalition for Edmonton).

Edmonton’s former mayor, Amarjeet Sohi, did not seek re-election. He recently ran as a Liberal candidate in the federal election, receiving 38.8 per cent in Edmonton Southeast, losing to Conservative MP Jagsharan Singh Mahal, who captured 52.9 per cent of the vote.

After failing to enter federal politics, Sohi resumed his mayoral responsibilities leading up to Monday’s election.

While Edmonton’s results continue to be tallied slowly, the official results will be reported by noon on Friday.