Alberta: NDP Need An Answer Beyond UCP Bashing

On Nagging Fears

I’ve been thinking about the 2023 Alberta election a lot in decent months, with Jason Kenney’s atrocious approvals and the big lead the NDP has on the current polls, and yet I find this hard to write for some reason. I can pretend I don’t actually know what the reason is, but it’s simple - I’m finding myself increasingly convinced that the NDP won’t actually win, and that it’ll be their fault when they don’t.

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Now, let’s be clear here - if an election was held today, I have no doubt that the NDP would win, and probably by the kind of landslide that the polls and the seat projections are pointing to. This isn’t in any way an exercise in doubting that, but it’s an exercise in remembering Kenney has 18 months to call this election, and a lot of the Alberta left are currently complacent.

The left is in the ascendancy, with Notley et al leading handily in provincial polls and both Edmonton and Calgary electing progressive mayors, and with the Tories losing three seats federally two months ago. It’s been a good few months to be a progressive in Alberta strictly from the perspective of winning elections, even as the health outcomes of the province have been disastrous. It’s a bad spot to be in, to be doing better as your province burns of COVID, but it’s still good to be winning and leading, right?

Well, the problem is they’re leading as a default posture, because of course they are. Kenney is leading an incompetent clusterfuck of a government, and the NDP are leading accordingly. But nowhere in any of this is a coherent NDP vision for Alberta, or an answer to why the NDP will be less toxic after four years of opposition than they were when they were last in government. If the answer to why the NDP will win now after being thoroughly rebuked last time is “Kenney is bad”, it means their floor is not much above their 2019 performance, because if Kenney stops being bad, their entire electoral argument goes out the window.

Alberta New Democrats, and the broader left, have to figure out a coherent answer on oil, a coherent answer on federalism, and a broader offer to the public. Managerial competence is attractive to the voters in a crisis, but the next election will not be a referendum on the past, but a choice between two futures, and it’s the case that the NDP have not publicly shown any interest in the choice they’ll offer to the people.

The NDP are going to have to deal with three realities in their 2023 campaign - a far more stringent national environmental policy than the one Notley dealt with in government, a province much more angry at Ottawa generally, and the challenges of governing on the back of rising, pandemic related debts as a progressive party with spending plans. Notley needs a lot of federal CPC voters to support her, and praying for a vote split to deliver government again would be fanciful nonsense.

The NDP need to reckon with the twin realities that they need an aggressive climate policy both for the policy reality of the world we live in, and as a marker to differentiate themselves from the UCP, but they need to accept the fact that the politics of realignments are harder in Alberta. The Alberta NDP will win government next - be it in 2023, 2027, or sometime in the 2030s - with an almost singularly urban and suburban caucus, but that doesn’t mean they can just ride the Global Fucking Realignment to victory. Calgary is the whole ball game at this point, and the NDP need to make deep and lasting gains in a city that is financed and run in decent measure by the oil industry.

The oil industry employs a sizable amount of people, revenues are worth a couple billion this year to the Alberta government, and it’s an industry which supports a lot of others. It’s an environmental monstrosity, but it’s also an industry which has financed a lot of the boom years for Alberta, and continues to finance good-paying engineering and white collar work in Calgary. It’s crude, and often wrong, to think of oil jobs as a Fort Mac question, because the impacts of the industry extend on down to Calgary.

Think of the people who are realigning left globally - it’s doctors, accountants, bankers, and lawyers, mostly. Well, Calgary law firms sign their bonuses with oil money, Alberta hedge fund bros are universally invested in the good fortune of Alberta oil, and it’s therefore a lot harder for the typical white collar professional to vote for environmental policies that will actually hurt them, and so the NDP will have to find their answer on oil. It’s probably a combination of carbon taxation and carbon capture and storage, but even still, where’s the policy for Alberta to cement their place as a leader on clean energy and R&D?

The NDP have even less of an answer on the federation, properly mocking the Kenney referendum while making no effort to actually articulate an answer to the widespread belief that Alberta’s getting screwed. Was the referendum a joke? Of course it was, but constitutional law sermons as the people feel like they are getting screwed won’t fly. The NDP need a path forward that doesn’t sound like a bunch of elitists dunking on the unwashed rubes for not understanding why their anger is misplaced.

And the last problem is, Notley’s going to need to figure out how to find a path forward on health funding, on education, university policy, and a whole host of other issues, with little money unless she raises taxes. Finding a rate rise that can raise enough to fund spending ambition and not hurt the middle class is always hard for progressives, and here it’s even harder, with all of the pandemic debt on the books. She’ll need an eyecatching, endlessly repeatable, deliverable promise, especially given that Kenney took the federal child care money (which, while obviously was the right governance decision, does hurt her a little politically).

The UCP are spending this weekend tearing themselves apart, and there’s a decent chance Notley won’t be running against Kenney when the election does come, but the NDP have been riding on UCP discontent to their polling lead, and in so doing, they leave themselves open to getting burned when the time comes. If they want to win, they’ll also be spending this weekend - and every one after it - figuring out how to make the case not just that the UCP have failed, but that the NDP have the answers. If they do, they’ll be easily rewarded with a return to office. If not, Notley’s turn as opposition leader might go down as an Adrian Dix level performance - a masterclass at winning the polls and not winning on the day. I don’t want that to be the case, but the chance it might is sticking in my head.

The next election is the NDP’s to win, but they have to go and win it. Right now, they’re winning by default. They can’t assume that will be the case in 2023.