Nenshi’s NDP On Track For Disaster

Time To Treat This Like The Crisis It Is

Naheed Nenshi is going to get destroyed at the next election.

I hate to do this, genuinely - I wanted to be wrong in Nenshi. I did not think he was the hero the Alberta NDP needed, but at the end of the day he was their choice, on a simple premise - he had won Calgary before. And yet, it was a bullshit premise, because Danielle Smith is not as incompetent as Bill Smith.

The premise of a Nenshi leadership was that he was the silver bullet to breaking into Calgary - a city that voted essentially in a tie in 2023 would be enticed by a former Mayor who had shown form in winning the city. It made sense nominally - Nenshi had won by 7% in 2017, and such a win would represent a big enough margin to form government - but it was premised on a misunderstanding of Danielle Smith. Danielle Smith, unlike Bill (as far as I can tell no relation), is good at politics. Bill Smith wasn’t.

Danielle Smith often gets mocked by progressives and liberals as an idiot and a dumbass, but she is an effective Albertan politician. Her job is to govern for Alberta and to deliver a mandate and a priorities list for the majority of Albertans. She has delivered on that goal. Many - including myself - might hate that goal, but that’s the goal, and she has achieved it. And Nenshi is now stuck in no man’s land, attempting to use his stature as Mayor to his advantage while also running away from his failures. Spoiler: it’s not working.

The problems with this strategy have been clear since 2024, but the NDP’s problems go back to 2021, the first time I wrote about Alberta for this site. They don’t know what they’re arguing for, they only know what they’re against - and that’s not enough to get to a majority of the vote in a city where all the marginal seats are.

Calgary is a weird city, and a city where its “conservative” nature is both understated and oversimplified. But it’s a city that makes rational decisions, as much as Laurentian Elites like me don’t always want them to be rational. One of the things that people outside of Alberta don’t get is just how much the proceeds of the oil boom have flowed to Calgary, and especially the kinds of well off, socially liberal voters - and especially white voters, let’s be real - who shifted so much of the Golden Horseshoe and richy rich places like West Van from marginals to safe seats.

If you took that voter - lawyer at a good firm, accountant at Deloitte or KPMG, even a surgeon - and placed them in Toronto or Oakville or wherever they’re probably on Carney’s side, probably voted for Trudeau, and a bunch of them were Harper 2015-Trudeau 2019 and 2021 voters - essentially the only group in Canada who were that way. They’re socially liberal, have been in more gay weddings than they can count, are intensely comfortable with modern society, and concerned about climate change. That same voter in Calgary is a Prentice-Kenney-Notley voter provincially and only might have voted for the LPC under Carney for the first time ever, for a reason - their livelihoods depend on the oil patch, so they’re not so cavalier about it.

And that’s what fucking gets me about the Alberta NDP - if I can fucking understand all this, why can’t they? Nenshi was the Mayor for 11 years, and yet he’s nowhere, down 5% in his home city in Liaison and down 13% overall in a Leger poll that refused to release its regional crosstabs. It is unacceptable to be so unable to crack the only fundamental question there is to crack about the city that will decide government.

Nenshi’s not just not on track to win, but he’s on track to get smashed. He’d be pretty close to losing 10 seats if the election was today, putting the party closer to 2019’s disaster than the 2023 close call. The party, having went for the flashy sales pitch of Nenshi, will likely be stuck with it for a lack of better options, and the UCP will gladly, gleefully rub their hands together. Because at the end of the day Danielle Smith has two jobs, and she succeeds at them.

Danielle Smith’s job is to govern Alberta sufficiently to the right that the lunatic fringe stay in the party, and to beat the NDP. That’s the job. Nothing more, nothing less. That sounds easy, but Jason Kenney couldn’t fucking do it, and it’s unlikely many others could. Go too far to the lunatic fringe and the NDP could be palatable; don’t give them enough, and you have a splinter party getting 15% in rural Alberta, 7% in Calgary, and suddenly the NDP win up the middle. It’s a genuinely difficult situation for a leader of the UCP, but she manages it successfully. And that’s where people will scoff, but it’s true - she’s objectively keeping a hard to please coalition together and beating back Nenshi.

Either Smith is genuinely crap at politics, and Nenshi’s failure to even come close to beating her is unacceptable, or she’s good at politics and Nenshi is unprepared for the challenge. Either way, Nenshi and the NDP have a lot of questions to answer. And yet it feels like Alberta’s conservative reputation is stopping us from expecting anything from Nenshi, in a similar way to Notley. The Alberta NDP almost treat elections like a free swing - if we win, great! If we don’t, it’s impossible to win in Alberta. That’s not good enough.

The problem with Alberta politics is it often feels like I have more ambition than the actual NDP. I know for a fact that there are many dedicated, passionate volunteers in the party and the broader progressive movement in Alberta who definitely have more ambition than the party. And it’s not good enough. Nenshi’s NDP is on route to get destroyed. And we will all suffer the consequences.