Gordon Wells Shrake (February 4, 1937 – May 30, 2024) was a Canadian politician who first served as a City of

Calgary Calgary () is a major city in the Canadian province of Alberta. As of 2021, the city proper had a population of 1,306,784 and a metropolitan population of 1,481,806 making it the third-largest city and fifth-largest metropolitan area in C ...

Alderman from 1971 until 1982, when he was elected as a member of the

Legislative Assembly of Alberta The Legislative Assembly of Alberta is the deliberative assembly of the province of Alberta, Canada. It sits in the Alberta Legislature Building in Edmonton. Since 2012 the Legislative Assembly has had 87 members, elected first past the post f ...

, serving from 1982 to 1993.

Alderman

Shrake was first elected to the Calgary city council on October 25, 1971. He served as a municipal councilor until he resigned after winning a seat in the provincial legislature in 1982.

MLA

While still serving as an Alderman for the City of Calgary, Shrake ran as a Progressive Conservative candidate in the

1982 Alberta general election The 1982 Alberta general election was held on November 2, 1982, to elect members of the Legislative Assembly of Alberta. History Less than four years had passed since the Progressive Conservatives won their landslide victory in 1979. Premie ...

. He won the electoral district of

Calgary Millican Calgary-Millican was a provincial electoral district in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, mandated to return a single member to the Legislative Assembly of Alberta using the first past the post method of voting from 1971 to 1993. History The Calgary-M ...

defeating New Democrat candidate

David Swann David Richard Swann (born June 19, 1949) is a Canadian medical doctor and politician. He was the leader of the Alberta Liberal Party and Leader of the Opposition in the Alberta Legislature from December 2008 until resigning as party leader in ...

by a wide margin. He ran for his second term in office in the

1986 Alberta general election The 1986 Alberta general election was held on May 8, 1986, to elect members of the Legislative Assembly of Alberta. Peter Lougheed, who had created the modern Progressive Conservative Association of Alberta, Alberta Progressive Conservatives, ...

. This race proved to be a lot closer for Shrake as his popular vote was cut in half from 1982. Swann ran against him for the second time, doubling his popular vote, but not gaining enough support to win. Shrake would run for a third and final term in the

1989 Alberta general election The 1989 Alberta general election was held on March 20, 1989, to elect members of the Legislative Assembly of Alberta. Many political observers were surprised by the early election call as less than three years had passed since the previous el ...

. He would gain enough popular support to defeat New Democrat candidate Bill Flookes by just over 100 votes. Shrake retired from provincial politics at the dissolution of the Assembly in 1993. Shrake died on May 30, 2024, at the age of 87.

References

External links

Legislative Assembly of Alberta Members Listing
1937 births Progressive Conservative Association of Alberta MLAs Calgary city councillors 20th-century members of the Legislative Assembly of Alberta 2024 deaths {{Alberta-MLA-stub