Alberta: If The NDP Barely Cares, Why Should We
On A Party In Denial
Okay, so, can we just have this honest conversation?
Rachel Notley is now a sizeable underdog to win an election in Alberta if the election was today, which is a really, really bad sign given that the UCP’s big advantage was always time. The UCP was losing on that theoretical NowCast for the last two years, but their whole advantage was the idea that in time, when a campaign came or at least came close, they would rally back.
And now, they’ve already done it.
The NDP would win 37 seats if the election was tonight, per my model – I don’t think that’s an out of line view, but I haven’t seen if Fournier or Bryan have updated for Abacus, but if it’s anything I suspect it’s a little lower than consensus. The thing is, if this is where they are, they’re going to get curbstomped. This is an existential crisis for the NDP, and if there’s any hope of them getting their heads out of their asses and saving their party, it starts now, because they’re running out of time to stop the slow, seemingly inexorable slide back to an Albertan status quo.
And you know what the worst part is? I’m barely surprised.
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I’ve been writing for months now – actually, fuck that, since November 2021, actually – that the NDP’s position was great if you thought the UCP were so hated as to be capable of winning by default, but that the NDP was not doing anything to actively win this election. At no point since then have I been proven wrong, for one reason – I was fucking right. Notley and co. have positioned themselves in the ideological dead zone – they’re not running as centrists, but they’re also not really standing for anything.
It’s platitudes instead of policy from them – “we’ll protect public health care!” doesn’t work when the population doesn’t believe the UCP will dismantle the fundamental basis of a free at the point of use system, and the NDP has no coherent answers on inflation. We all know that Alberta is going to have a huge surplus in the fiscal year about to end, so where is the bold strategy on using those one off funds on, say, high speed rail or literally anything.
I know I sound like a broken record on this, but let’s just do the short version of this again. The voters who the NDP need to win over are predominantly well off, predominantly hold socially liberal values, and are most likely 2015 NDP or PC voters. These people are not the frothing at the mouth social radicals of the Wildrose tradition, these are people are comfortable with homosexuality and in many cases went from Wildrose to the PCs in 2012 because of Lake of Fire.
You want to claim that the NDP are doing a good job of appealing to these voters? You’re wrong, because here’s the thing – these voters are most likely to pay a lot of attention to the news, to know who all the people involved in this drama are, and they’re the type of people who are able to see lightweights a mile out. These are the Canadian equivalents of the voters who elected Brian Kemp in Georgia and then gave Herschel Walker the finger, the ones who respect intelligence in public life.
The voters we’re talking about – young professionals who work in white collar industries and have a lot of friends of either another race or another sexual orientation – looked at the unfocused, incoherent, and frankly wildly nonsensical campaign that Stacey ran and said they weren’t here for that level of bullshit. In the same way, if the Alberta NDP don’t get their heads out of their asses, these voters will look at Notley and go “this isn’t worth it.”
The it in question? These voters are economic conservatives – they’re well off voters who bore the brunt of the 2015 NDP tax rises, and who are still considering voting for a party that is actively against their narrow economic self interest. The most interesting thing about politics in the last decade is how the modern left is now getting voters whose taxes it is explicitly and openly wanting to rise to vote for them anyways, but the problem is the NDP doesn’t like these voters. The NDP doesn’t like the fact that winning province wide in Alberta requires rich lawyers and bankers and accountants to win, because their membership and their elites are people who quite dislike lawyers and bankers.
The problem with so much of this conversation is that it’s all a way of avoiding a very basic fact – for a lot of people, even people who dislike fiscal conservatism, their agreement with the NDP on, say, Red Deer needing a new hospital will not be enough to get them to vote for a party they think is full of urban elites who don’t understand people like them. Cultural understanding and not economic class is the new dividing line in politics, and the NDP either doesn’t get it or refuses to listen.
The NDP needs to make a big offer to Corporate Calgary, for lack of a better way of putting it. The next NDP government will not come with MLAs in Red Deer and Camrose, but will come from the NDP winning the voters of the charity dinner circuit, the people who know which fork to use for which course and can bullshit their way through polite society with a smile and a nod.
The problem is, the NDP long ago decided those kinds of people were the enemy, and that there was a way to revolutionize politics on the basis of class and not social values. Put another way, the Alberta NDP would rather the votes of the homophobic working class than the socially liberal rich, because to them, their sense of what voters they want starts and ends with economic class.
A lot of the voters who voted NDP in 2015 and will vote UCP in 2022 are not social liberals, because the NDP vote is going to be much more urban and much less regional. What the NDP have not reckoned with is that they can’t just magic themselves a voter coalition of people they like, because this is fucking Alberta. You don’t get to be choosy.
If the NDP can come up with a big offer to Calgary, maybe – maybe – they can still squeak out 44 seats and majority government. If they don’t come up with a way to peel off the disaffected UCPers who make a lot of money, think Danielle Smith is insane, and hates her anti-vax focus, then they’ll have tossed away their best and potentially only chance at winning government in anything resembling a fair fight they’ll ever have. This is their chance, but they won’t take it, for a simple reason – they don’t want to take any risks. Nobody inside the NDP wants to take a risk that could be the reason they’ll lose, but in so doing, they’ve guaranteed a loss.
The NDP at some point, consciously or not, made a decision that they were not going to lose this election by being too bold or by being too strident. The problem is, they’ve left themselves in a land of policy incoherence and nothingness. They’re a shell of what they could be, with a leader capable of selling a message that takes more than 4 words but being unable to make it. They are either misunderstanding their voters or grossly underestimating their intelligence, and now they’re losing the seat count and going the wrong way.
The NDP has at best 3.5 months to get their heads out of their asses and get into the game. Every minute they waste is a minute that makes Danielle Smith more likely to win a full term. It might be that beating a united right in Alberta is impossible, but the NDP cannot look themselves in the mirror and say they’ve done everything they can to win. If anything, they’ve done everything they can to lose this.
And when they do – because without a radical change, they will lose – every failure of the next UCP government is also on their conscience.
There is no leadership without courage and there is no courage without risk.
It's worse than NDP not standing for anything. The problem is most of the NDP are con artists. They're frauds. They're morally and ethically bankrupt. They have no creativity or intelligence. Notley broke AHS by filling it with 3132 bureaucrat fat cat AHS Managers earning $250,000 to $500,000 each pushing paper. Then there are the Union leeches who take in $300,000 for doing absolutely nothing (when they're not abusing their own members). NDP has no vision to "fix healthcare" when they broke it in 2015-2019. NDP despises nurses and doctors, cheering when 1000s of them were being assaulted for not taking the jab. NDP has no vision on green energy, education, etc. NDP candidates are "embarrassed to be in Alberta". Let's be honest, the miracle of NDP even having a shot at winning 37 seats at all, is purely due to a fawning sycophant media that has done everything possible to cover up NDPs failings and scandals. This is a gaggle of incompetents and miscreants who couldn't cut it one day in the real world. And the irony is, you see the exact same thing I do. And it frustrates you. As it should.