Canmore resident Sarah Elmeligi announced today that she is seeking the Alberta NDP nomination in Banff-Kananaskis to run in the next provincial election. She is the first candidate to announce plans to seek the nomination.
Elmeligi is a professional biologist and conservation and land-use planner. She currently runs her own consulting company but from 2016 to 2019 she worked as a Parks Facility Planner with the Kananaskis Region and from 2009 to 2013 was a Senior Conservation Planner with the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society – Southern Alberta Chapter.
She earned a PhD from Central Queensland University in Australia and since 2013 has been conducting Grizzly Bear research in the Rocky Mountains.
“I value working collaboratively with multiple stakeholders to define solutions that are good for people and good for the landscape,” Elmeligi said in a press release. “The Banff-Kananaskis Constituency is a very special place, appreciated by locals, Albertans, and international visitors for its natural splendor and varied recreational opportunities.”
If nominated, Elmeligi would face United Conservative Party MLA Miranda Rosin, who was elected in 2019 in the closest race outside of the province’s urban centres.
Former MLA Cam Westhead, who announced on Facebook today that he would not be seeking the nomination and would instead be running for re-election as Second Vice President of United Nurses of Alberta, was the only NDP incumbent in rural Alberta to increase his vote share from 2015.
Westhead finished 3 points higher than his 2015 results from the redistributed Banff-Cochrane district and Rosin finished 7 points lower than the combined Wildrose Party and Progressive Conservative results in the boundaries.
The 2019 race was geographically divided, with Banff, Canmore, and the First Nations communities in the western parts of the Bow River valley heavily voting NDP and the eastern polls, dominated by ranches, acreages and Calgary commuters, voting UCP.
As a backbench MLA, Rosin has stumbled into controversy numerous times over the past two years, from sending out a mailer declaring that the pandemic was over just as the third wave was just beginning to signing a letter calling on the provincial government to prematurely lift public health restrictions to allegedly improperly claiming more than $800 in meal per-diems.
Rosin has also defended the UCP’s plans to privatize and close provincial parks, a decision that Environment and Parks Minister Jason Nixon was forced to back down from after public backlash, and the UCP’s plans to open up the Rocky Mountains to open-pit coal mining – which the UCP has temporarily backed away from after another huge public backlash. Rosin also failed to stop the approval of the controversial Springbank Dam, an unpopular project in the eastern part of the district that she pledged to oppose.
A date for the NDP nomination meeting has not yet been set.
