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Liberal Matt Grant says he would never have been able to convince his wife Carly Duerr to support his bid to run for the job of member of Parliament for the new riding of Calgary Confederation if he had no chance to win it.

The fact the federal Liberals haven’t won a seat in the city since 1968 didn’t daunt him.

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“We didn’t do this as a flag-waving exercise,” said the 32-year-old local lawyer. “I wouldn’t have been able to put my wife through this for two years if I didn’t tell her that it was actually a legitimate opportunity.”

Photo by Supplied / Calgary Herald

Calgary Confederation was created through recently redrawn riding boundaries — carved out of the former ridings of Calgary-Nose Hill, Calgary Centre-North and Calgary West — and it has no incumbent MP.

Grant finds himself up against former Progressive Conservative MLA Len Webber, who won the federal Conservative Party of Canada nomination last year.

When a mid-September Mainstreet telephone poll had Grant and Webber in a statistical tie with 38 per cent and 37 per cent respectively of the decided vote, Grant felt his efforts to light a political fire under younger residents were starting to pay off.

“We’ve been saying we could win this for almost two years now, and finally people are starting to take us seriously,” he said. “They called us crazy, but we’ve always seen opportunity here.”