Alberta Byelections: If You Think This Is Fine You’re Not Paying Attention

In Defence Of Standards

Fine.

Monday night there were 3 byelections in Alberta, all of which were some level of interesting and none of which were in any particular way surprising. If you want to be charitable to Naheed Nenshi, he did better than expected in Strathcona, and he didn’t lose Ellerslie. But at the end of the day there’s only one word to describe the performance.

Fine.

I am no fan of Nenshi and find his leadership to be shit. I think he’s a fundamentally unserious person who isn’t up to the job of Opposition leader, and I maintain there were at least two better options who at one point ran to replace Rachel Notley than him. I think history will look at him as an arrogant and vain man who will never achieve what he wants to achieve. And one of the reasons that is what I believe is because he’s made people accept tonight’s result as something other than a disaster. To the NDP, these results are fine. And that’s the whole fucking problem.

If the NDP got their result in Strathcona across the province, or at least the two urban centres, then you’d probably see a bare NDP majority. It’s a genuinely stunning result - I was prepared for Nenshi to underperform Notley, for the not-unreasonable reasons that he is a carpetbagger and Notley would have presumably had a sizable personal vote in the seat, having held it for so long. And it’s paired with an even greater tragedy in Ellerslie, where the party suffered a 12% swing.

For those who want to take the positive trend on this, it exists. It’s intellectual hackery to pretend that Strathcona meant something that can be replicated elsewhere but that Ellerslie is just evidence of bad results with minorities, but let’s even interrogate the first half of that. Strathcona being representative of anywhere else in the province seems like a bold claim, and I think the idea that this proves the NDP vote is getting more efficient is more hope than reality at this point. How something plays in Strathcona is not how it plays in Sherwood Park, and the UCP will play much tougher defence in their donut seats than the offence they played in Strathcona.

The idea that this result from the Republican Party of Alberta, the separatist “threat” in the rural seat up tonight, is some form of threat to Danielle Smith is laughable. We see this all the time - remember when Annamie Paul came in second in Toronto Centre when Bill Morneau resigned? How exactly did the Greens do at that General Election, again? - and I see no reason to think this force would survive the gravity of First Past The Post. Progressives understand this when talking about strategic voting on the left, but suddenly get horny for the idea of a double digit vote share on the right splitting the UCP. We saw various versions of various right-minors poll well when Jason Kenney was Premier and then got nowhere once the election came. It shouldn’t be different here.

Ellerslie is a fucking disaster - the kind of complete abandonment of NDP voters from the party that should scare them. Yes, the small Liberal vote should come back, but the UCP lost votes to the RPA and still gained overall. There was real NDP —> UCP voters in Ellerslie, and if that’s replicated the NDP can’t win government. The NDP’s relative weakness in the less white parts of Calgary is arguably what cost them the election in 2023, as the swings ended up being slightly bigger in whiter seats than in more heavily ethnic ones. If the NDP aren’t making gains in Calgary they’re not winning, and the most likely to gain look pretty similar to Ellerslie. If you’re tossing a dozen points of margin off the side in Ellerslie, you’re not gaining Calgarys North, Cross, or East, and that’s the ballgame. Even if the NDP won Lethbridge East, Morinville-St. Albert, and Strathcona-Sherwood Park on rural vote splitting and/or better vote efficiency, that’s still short of the number needed to win the election.

But remember, Nenshi did fine.

He only did fine if we’ve decided that he shouldn’t be graded on the test that the Alberta NDP need to be graded on, which is ability to win the next election. They’re the underdogs in Alberta, sure, but they’re not the plucky underdogs who are just happy to be here anymore. They claim to be a serious party that is in it to form government. If you think Nenshi did fine you think that forming government isn’t the standard he should be held to, whether you admit it or not. I’m not going to accept that.

This result is consistent with a better performance than 2019, which is what some of the polls have modelled out as a likely outcome. This is better than that, I guess, and would likely see a seat total in the 30s if reflected provincially. But if that’s anything other than a huge failure to you then I don’t view politics as the same as you. The goal is to win the next election. These results are not indicative of an opposition going to do that, they’re indicative of an opposition that’s done shit and so we’re pretending these results are fine.

Danielle Smith is a danger that is trying to juice her internal standing by pandering to separatists. She is a lunatic that has never found a wedge issue she doesn’t love. She is everything progressives claim to hate. And yet people are pretending that Naheed Nenshi’s leadership isn’t a five alarm fire. If the argument is that nobody could be in an election winning position as Smith plays politics with Canada’s place in Confederation, I fervently disagree. If the argument is Nenshi should be winning against a government this bad, then these results are a huge fucking problem. Whether you’re willing to hold Nenshi to a standard is the answer to whether you think these results are fine or not.

More bluntly, if you think fine is good enough then absolutely, from the bottom of my heart, get the fuck out of progressive politics. The culture of accepting good enough - which I’m currently railing against in Ontario - is unacceptable. It is a way to consistently lose elections, because we need to actually hold our leaders to a standard, or we’ll never win anything.

But sure, he did fine.

If you’re willing to accept four more years of Danielle Smith as fine, too.