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As election campaigns go, Coun. Tim Cartmell is making his pitch to be Edmonton’s next mayor in an unusual way — by promising nothing.

No new LRT line. No gleaming new stadium. No big service expansions. No major reinventions of the wheel.

Forget grand, ambitious visions of a Paris on the Prairies.

For Cartmell, the focus is not on city-building so much as city-fixing — a natural instinct, he says, that comes from being an engineer by trade.

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That’s a decidedly unsexy way to run a campaign, but it may also be the game plan Edmonton needs right now.

Cartmell honed in on that theme — getting “back to basics” — repeatedly Thursday to a crowd of several hundred people at an upscale luncheon event that, I have to say, didn’t entirely match the chord he was striking.

Nonetheless, it was an effective speech, delivered calmly, directly and with a confidence born of two terms under the city hall pyramids. It felt like the kind of speech he’s been waiting to give for seven years, and it easily allowed him to pass the eye and ear test as a mayoral figure.

As for his policy agenda, it’s still mostly in the plans-to-make-plans stage without a lot of specifics, which will hopefully come in due course. This speech was more about setting a tone.

“I’m a get sh– done guy,” he said, in what became the unofficial tagline of the event. “I want to surround myself with people who want to get sh– done. Not talkers who want to talk about what should happen.”

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In that vein, to be fair, Cartmell is not really promising nothing. It’s just that instead of pledging investments in new things right now, he wants to prioritize repairs to the things that he sees as broken, from bridges and buses to Blatchford and balance sheets. (Anything that starts with a B, anyway.)

Excessive restraint can carry as much risk as ambition, especially in a rapidly growing city, but Cartmell is likely right to sense a mood among voters for modesty. I suspect we will soon hear similar refrains from other candidates.

After all, there is........

© Edmonton Journal