Nenshi's Not The NDP's Answer

Spare Us, Please

Let’s start this column by saying a few things that should go without saying. Whoever wins the Alberta NDP leadership race will have my support. I do not support Danielle Smith. I want an Alberta NDP government. All columnizing and tweets are in the service of influencing the not-inconsiderable Alberta following I have, both of regular voters/members and of people with important titles.

I’m laying all of this out because the last time I focused on Alberta politics I got accused more than a few times of being a conservative or wanting conservatives to win for the crime of pointing out Rachel Notley’s bad campaign was, indeed, a bad campaign. I want a progressive government in Alberta. I desperately want one.

Which is why I am begging and pleading with the Alberta NDP membership to not hitch their wagon to the sinking ship that is Naheed Nenshi.

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Let’s skip past the fact that Nenshi doesn’t have a seat in the Legislature or much of a path to getting one beyond hoping Joe Ceci retires for him. Let’s skip past the fact that his time as Mayor of Calgary has raised significant questions about his ability to do the basic parts of the job of leading a team, which is to say managing a group and keeping everyone happy and rowing in the right direction. And let’s ignore the fact that it will have been 10 years from his last election by the time the 2027 election happens. (Okay, technically 9.5.) Let’s ignore all of that.

This is the man who told high school students in 2023 that Danielle Smith would never attack trans kids and trans health care. This is the man who relayed this story at a rally where he claimed Smith’s attacks were “un-Albertan”, and said that those who were fighting for trans kids would win. It was a great rally speech, but as an act of politics, it was fraudulent. Nenshi clearly failed to understand what the UCP is and the threat they posed to Albertans. Maybe it’s why he waited so long to endorse Notley.

He also doesn’t understand Alberta, clearly, if he thinks that these issues are a winner for the left. The one Leger poll we have suggests that the health care restrictions are essentially break even but the idea of parental notification is hugely popular. It’s also the case that oftentimes issue polling overstates the socially liberal case – the Australian gay marriage postal survey polling saw No end up at about 30% on average, before breaking 38%, with the same being true in Ireland when they passed Marriage Equality. This is also pretty consistent with the US evidence on both gay marriage and guns, though not quite as bad in the US. (That said, the pro-abortion side did win bigger than the polls in Ireland and US pro-abortion activists have had a good run of form.)

So, his one big contribution to Albertan public life is to come out on the morally correct but electorally losing side of a culture issue. He has never really been able to decide what he thinks about climate change and the oil industry, wanting an opt-out for the City of Calgary from paying Notley’s tax but endorsing Notley’s carbon tax in exchange for Trans Mountain. He’s doing Jespersen on Tuesday so we’ll see if he has a better answer on climate than this, but at some point there’s nothing really stopping us from being honest about Nenshi.

Past electoral performance is not particularly predictive of the future. Remember when Olivia Chow came in third in 2014’s Mayoral election, ran back to her old Federal riding, and then got destroyed in 2015? I partially dismissed her candidacy for the 2023 Mayoral byelection because she had not, in recent times, been a good candidate. Guess what? She was a star. John Tory was a loser – losing in 2003 and then losing to Wynne in Don Valley in 2007 and then losing a PCPO seat at the ’09 byelection – and then he became one of the most prolific winners in recent times. “But he won as Mayor” isn’t an argument for his electability, it’s an argument that he was at one point electable. After seeing the monstrosity of Jean Charest’s CPC leadership campaign, which suffered from a complete lack of understanding of what voters want in a modern context, you’d think we’d do better than to assume that prior ability would perfectly translate.

What Alberta needs is a leader who has the savvy to understand how to do a very difficult thing, which is sell progressive ideas to a conservative province and a conservative electorate. That is a hard thing to do, which is why Rachel Notley’s refusal to listen to me or Max or any of the others screaming for months and months to get in the game angers me so much. To replace Notley with a leader who shares the tone-deaf qualities that cost the Alberta NDP government once would be a suicide mission.

Nenshi has been very obviously running for this job since he endorsed Notley, but he’s put nothing on the bone except set himself up as a lightning rod for the right. He may “speak truth” about Danielle Smith but the problem is you need to pick a leader who will make people who voted UCP last time not vote for them this time, not a leader who makes my mentions happy. It’s about wanting to win the province as it exists, not the province he wants to exist.

It is exceedingly clear that the Alberta NDP need a leader who understands why Rachel Notley went wrong. It’s not because she was insufficiently committed to climate action, as Sarah Hoffman claimed, and it’s not because she was insufficiently willing to tie herself to the broadside of a woke policy anchor. It’s because Notley’s NDP were in a bubble, unable and unwilling to listen to anyone outside of the inner circle. Nenshi may be in a different bubble, but the idea that someone who has so catastrophically misread the threat and the intentions of this UCP government is going to be the one to truly put the province on the right track is absurd.

If he wins I’ll support him because at the end of the day an imperfect progressive politician is infinitely better than a conservative one. But Naheed Nenshi is not the solution to the NDP’s problems, merely a different flavour of the same core issues that plagued the party under previous leadership. There are two candidates who are at least showing some progress towards rising to the occasion, Rakhi Pancholi and Kathleen Ganley. Nenshi, far from a saviour, would represent a boat anchor to the chances of victory in 2027. And with the UCP doing so much damage that’s the only test that matters. Pancholi or Ganley, for the love of God.