If the civic elections in Calgary and Toronto are any indication, the rednecks have all moved east.

It’s a long way from Cowtown to Hogtown, of course, but compared to Calgary’s newly elected mayor, Naheed Nenshi, a leading Toronto contender, Rob Ford, comes across as the bumpkin.

Nenshi, a Harvard graduate who teaches business at Mount Royal University, extols the virtues of arts and culture, public space and urbanity. He emerged from the back of the pack to win handily on Monday, beating the usual assortment of right-wing nay-sayers and celebrity candidates with little to add. Sophisticated, articulate and decidedly intellectual, he is everything Ford isn’t.

Not only is Nenshi the first member of a visible minority to be elected mayor of Calgary, he’s the first Muslim chosen to run a major Canadian city. His campaign emphasized urban revitalization. Nenshi’s passion, he explains, is cities. As lead author of Building Up: Making Canada’s Cities Engines of Growth and Magnets of Development, he has definite ideas about to help cities work better for all residents.

Unlike Ford, whose five-step plan for Toronto has yet to progress beyond the anger stage, Nenshi talks eloquently about what Calgary could become. He doesn’t see a boom-and-bust oil industry centre, but a fully realized city, diverse, urban and transit-based. He has argued against sprawl and insists that he will make all Calgary’s neighbourhoods safer, greener and more engaging. He focuses on the physical realm as much as issues of municipal governance.

While Ford peddles a bogus vision of the past, Nenshi looks unabashedly to the future. Nenshi wants Calgary to be the city of tomorrow; Ford would turn Toronto into the city of yesterday.

At any other time, the electorate would have dismissed Ford as another suburban councillor with an oversized chip on his oversized shoulders. But many Torontonians share the anger and frustration.

“Today Calgary is a different place than it was yesterday,” Nenshi said after his victory. “It’s a better place.”

He also reflected on his campaign, which, he explained, “was never about winning an election . . . It was about revitalizing the level of conversation in the city. It was about talking to the person next to you on the bus, it was about taking an extra minute with the cashier at Safeway, and now it is about doing the work to build a better Calgary that we all dream of,”

Compare that to the Toronto election where the shouting is all about stopping the party, ending the gravy train, cutting staff, reducing the number of councillors, getting rid of streetcars, turning away immigrants . . . It is the cry of a city that some think has lost control of, and worse, faith in, itself.

Also a big factor in Nenshi’s win was social media, of which he is a natural master. Young Calgarians, who gravitated to his campaign in droves, also turned out to vote in unprecedented numbers. Indeed, 52 percent of eligible voters turned out for Monday’s, up from 33 percent in 2007. Nenshi was supported by 40 percent of voters; his closest rival got 32.

Thanks to them, Nenshi, 38, has broken every stereotype in the book. In his own way, so has Ford, albeit in different ways. But these days, as one truism after falls by the wayside, that’s starting to seem normal in Canada.

Much has been said in recent years about the shift of power — economic and political — to the West. Despite conventional wisdom, that has little to do with the misguided machinations of Prime Minister Stephen Harper or the grim reality of the tar sands. It’s because the largest city in Alberta, the Tory heartland, has the intelligence and courage to elect Nenshi.

And speaking of Harper, his candidate, a veteran Calgary councillor named Ric McIver, was widely expected to win. Instead, he came in a resounding second. Dubbed “Dr. No” by critics grown tired of his response to any question involving new ideas, McIver’s defeat marks the passing of the old order.

Toronto has plenty of McIvers, alas, but no Nenshis. Ours is a campaign of familiar faces saying things heard many times before. Their argument is that Toronto needs saving, not fixing. In fact, there are countless reasons for civic optimism, but even these leave some feeling threatened.

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If Calgary’s election signals a city whose faith in itself is growing, Toronto’s shows a city whose fear of itself only increases.

Christopher Hume can be reached at chume@thestar.ca

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