It's not unusual to have people knocking on your door Saturday morning handing out pamphlets, but if you live in southwest Calgary then Saturday morning those people were likely politicians.
They're hoping round up voters for the upcoming Calgary Glenmore byelection.
There's just over three weeks left until the polls open and candidates are hitting the streets to get out the vote.
Palliser Place is an election hotbed. Conserviative signs go in the ground aside Wild Rose Alliance markers, and across the street teens stuff mailboxes with Liberal flyers, but in the rest of the community it's hard to tell there's an election going on,.
Area residents say they've heard few knocks on the door. That is about to change, Four of the five candidates in the upcoming vote hit the streets Saturday.
Dianne Colley-Urquhart is the Conservative candidate, but in a ten minute interview with CTV News, she never once mentioned the party leader Ed Stelmach, instead focusing on her experience as an alderman and area resident.
She says, "All politics is local, and that has been my training for the last nine years, of being hands on, of living in the community, of dealing with every conceivable issue you can imagine."
Wild Rose Alliance leader Paul Hinman doesn't mind mentioning Ed Stelmach. His campaign slogan is "Send Ed a message."
Hinman says. "It goes back to all the people that have complained that Ed is even there. If they'd have voted where they really wanted, instead of a second choice of Stelmach, he wouldn't even be there right now and a lot of people are saying that."
A lot of people are taking about health care. It's the issue candidates say comes up most often.
Liberal candidate Avalon Roberts is the former chair of "Friends of Medicare". For her, taking Tories to task over health care is nothing new. "The lack of resources, the dire situation in the emergency rooms, the lack of primary care is unacceptable in a first world country in one of the wealthiest places in the world, and I would like to be asking for an explanation for that in the Legislature.
While most of the parties focus on getting their voters to the polls, Social Credit candidate Len Skowronski is focusing on getting his message to the voters. A big part of that message is that the Social Credit party still exists. He says, "Now many of the PC's are ex-Socreds. We are trying to get them to come back to the fold and that's my job to let them know that we are here."
One thing all the candidates agree on is that you'll see a lot more of them knocking on doors leading up to the election on September 14th.
There is also an NDP candidate in Calgary Glenmore. His name is Eric Carpendale. CTV News was unable to contact him on Saturday.
