Alberta: Are The NDP Running Out Of Time?

On A Lingering Nightmare

Let’s paint a hypothetical here, and see how plausible it is to you.

Danielle Smith calls the Alberta election for May 29^th, as is currently the most likely date per Alberta’s Fixed Election laws. Let’s assume that the polls in the final weekend on average point to a rough tie in the popular vote, as they have for most of Smith’s tenure as UCP leader, and the combined seat average of Grenier, Fournier, me, and 2CloseToCall all end up with the NDP roughly at 40 seats, so short of government but in with a theoretical chance.

That is, I think, the likeliest path for the next two and a half months, at this point, but I also feel in my core what would happen at that point. The UCP will end up winning the popular vote by a decent margin, the NDP will not come nearly as close as the polls say to their rural targets because the polls will understate the UCP’s support as they always do, and the NDP won’t do quite as well as the polls say in Calgary either.

The NDP in this scenario are projected for 40 seats, they end up with between 34 and 38, some in the NDP try to pretend this was a good result because their Parliamentary Party is now 1.5x the size it was when the election was called, others get mad because they lost, and then the conversation comes around to why the NDP lost.

I do not want this scenario, as a progressive who thinks Danielle Smith is crazy, but every time I close my eyes and think about Alberta politics, this feels inevitable.

…

Since the last time I wrote about Alberta, there’s been the Alberta budget, which has been attacked by the NDP as both insufficient for the scale of needs around education and health while also being mad they’re not continuing the gas tax freeze indefinitely, which seems counterintuitive from a party that came into office acknowledging basic concepts like changes in prices impacts demand for products. They’re also amplifying attacks on the UCP for not caring enough about Calgary, introducing free prescription contraception, attacking the orphan well plans, and claiming they’ll protect public health care in some undefined nebulous way. (There’s also been one poll, an Abacus poll that my model would have the NDP winning 39 seats on, for what it’s worth.)

There’s nothing wrong with any of those things in a vacuum – and I do get the politics of rolling out the (good, necessary, and morally correct) contraceptives policy on International Women’s Day – but there’s quite the dissonance in the way the NDP is jumping all over the place. There’s still no coherent message about what an NDP government would do if they won, and that’s not good enough.

What the Alberta NDP needs to do is find a way to tie in the UCP’s disinterest in downtown Calgary with the need for better health care in a way that articulates a very specific set of Alberta NDP values. What does the Alberta NDP stand for is always a hard question to answer, because Notley spends so much time talking about what she stands against – the Federal Liberals, the Federal NDP, the UCP, and general Eastern Canadian wokeness. (Note: it’s actually Central Canadian wokeness, but most Albertans think “Eastern Canada” starts at Thunder Bay, so…)

The Alberta NDP fundamentally suffers from their proximity to things that are deeply unpopular in Alberta, so they have to spend so much time explaining they’re not like the bad thing that everyone associates them with, they never make an argument for themselves as an institution. The other reason why that’s true is that they don’t know what they actually stand for – the NDP are in the place they are in Alberta politics almost entirely by accident, a fluke of timing in 2015. They ran as “not Prentice and not Wildrose” in 2015, won, and now are trying to win against a united right. They don’t know how to do that, because in many cases they never had the internal fights that would allow them to come to a coherent message.

They’re a party of Edmonton that needs to nearly sweep Calgary to win, they’re a party whose membership are substantially to my left who needs to win voters substantially to my right to win office, and they’re a party of old school left wingers who need to win people who would still identify as small-c conservatives even if they vote Alberta NDP. They need a sizable chunk of regular, consistent Federal Conservative voters to win, and they can’t bring themselves to run a campaign or a strategy to do it.

The lack of any actual Alberta NDP messaging or strategy is what leads to the UCP controlling the narrative and more importantly stopping the NDP from getting anywhere. Any day spent on how the Feds are evil or spent on really anything to do with Danielle Smith is a failure, because those are days the NDP cannot fight a campaign on their own merits. And unless the right is split, the default will be that the NDP has to win government, because it’s Alberta, and in Alberta tie goes to the right.

You can dislike that fact as much as you’d like, but it is the case that the right in Alberta benefits from the values of both incumbency but also inertia – they win unless you can make a really, really damn compelling case against them. In 2015, the chaos of Stelmach, Redford, Prentice, the (Danielle Smith-orchestrated) Wildrose floor crossing, and an oil price in freefall meant that the NDP could get over the line with a substantial vote split. But it didn’t mean there was suddenly majority support for a redistributive economic agenda in Alberta.

What the NDP should do is make a choice – either run as the party of Trudeauism, of a redistributive economic system, some social liberalism but not to the extent of the federal NDP, and lose, or run to the centre and actually articulate a form of muscular centrism that cares about outcomes and not process. The long term goal of non-Conservative government in Alberta needs the NDP to decide what the fuck they stand for, because it’s increasingly apparent that the status quo will lead to failure.

I think it’s fair to say that I do not have a track record of being pessimistic on parties of the left and parties I want to win elections. Sometimes I’m right in my optimism, sometimes I’m wrong, but there has never been a case where I’ve been pessimistic on the left and they’ve proven me wrong. If the NDP continues to drift in the abyss of vaguely left wing policies without coherent narrative or vision, they’ll project for something like 40-ish seats by election day and end up winning 5 less than the models say when the results are inevitably a few points right of the polls.

I don’t want to be right about this, but the Alberta NDP are running out of time to define themselves as opposed to being “Not Danielle Smith”, and if they don’t fucking do it – and fast – they’ll have to live with the regret.