Nenshi's Union Busting Betrayal

On Nenshi's Union Busting Letter

I don’t even know where to fucking start.

In 2019, Naheed Nenshi sent a letter to Jason Copping, then-UCP Minister of Labour and Immigration, with two asks. In and of itself, a mayor sending a letter to a provincial Minister isn’t a scandal. But it is when you ask the province to give Calgary powers to unilaterally alter existing and pending collectively bargained agreements with union workers, and it is when you ask for exemptions from provincial law to make it easier to outsource public services from public, union workforces to private, non-union workers.

There’s no pithy quote, no extended metaphor, no song and dance here. Naheed Nenshi tried to use the then-recently elected UCP government to allow him to override a contract he and Council had agreed to as Mayor. He wanted the UCP to buy him out of his budget mess on the backs of public servants who had negotiated in good faith, thinking that Naheed Nenshi and the City’s word was worth the paper it was written on.

We’ve always known that Nenshi is all about Nenshi and not about any actual form of principle, but this … this is a step too far. If Nenshi is willing to throw the very principle of collective bargaining out the window to cover $31M in salary raises - representing a 1.5% rise, so not exactly a lavish raise - then he is fully capable of throwing the baby, the bath water, and the tub itself out. Rigidity and dogma from progressives is bad, sure. But so is the prospect of electing someone who is so untethered to any previous commitment that they think union busting is the way to solve a $31M budget shortfall. 

And holy fucking hell should this terrify progressives who think Nenshi is the right answer, because if he will conceive of this, there’s no telling what he’d give up to become Premier.

…

The case for Naheed Nenshi has always been slightly ambiguous. He is everything to everybody, an attempt to both claim he’s always been essentially one of us to those with actual long-term investments in the Alberta NDP but also playing on the fact that he is a new and different kind of progressive. His calling card is the idea he can win because he did win in Calgary three times. Whether that winning would translate is unclear, as those who hoped Bonnie Crombie would save the Ontario Liberals saw last week.

Nenshi can’t claim he’s been a committed fighter of the UCP for years because he hasn’t been. He did endorse Notley in the final week of the 2023 campaign, a transparent set-up move to run for leader. It’s his right to want a second act in politics, and it seems sincere, or at least as sincere as it can be from Nenshi, that Danielle Smith’s attack on trans children has angered and offended him. But Nenshi is in so many ways an enigma, because that’s what he wants to be.

The take that I’ve been chewing on for months, ever since Nenshi re-emerged, was whether the best thing that ever happened to him was those polls showing him down 17 to Bill Smith. The lore of Nenshi as someone who can win an election comes from beating those supposedly insurmountable deficits, and he has absolutely used his underdog status in 2017 created by those polls to enforce the narrative he is a winner. But he’s used this notion to avoid answering what he actually stands for, or how he would win. The notion that he’s done the impossible before is the answer that handwaves away very legitimate concerns about whether a Nenshi leadership is actually worth fighting for.

To the extent that anyone is better than Smith, sure, Nenshi’s a credible person. Or, more accurately, he was. To the extent that this site has an ideological bent, it is a muscular pragmatism. I will gladly 80 cents on the dollar to beat dangerous and bad right wing governments. Perfect as the enemy of good is one of the things I despise more than anything. But there has to be a fundamental throughline of progressive instincts, or else you’re handing the keys of a progressive party to someone that cannot be trusted. And Nenshi now fails that test.

If Nenshi is willing to throw overboard the very basic tenets of collective bargaining because he lacked the courage to fight for what he had promised, and what he had committed, then his word means nothing. The fact that he was not just willing but eager to throw a collectively bargained agreement out the window, and additionally wanted to privatize public services to non-union workplaces, is unconscionable. The idea that homeowners in Calgary – many of whom won the fucking lottery of pricing and interest rates to own when they do – deserved the prioritization of the Mayor’s interest more than the City staff, many of whom doing work many would never do, is insane.

If the NDP have a brain, the next election will be in part about the fact that Danielle Smith has never made a commitment that has survived contact with reality. This is a Premier that promised the sun and the moon and is now governing like she never made any promises whatsoever. She is an easy mark for a leader who can make credibility and integrity a dividing line. If the guy who tried to override collectively bargained agreements leads the party of unions and labour, you’ve got a better chance of Calgarians cheering for the Oilers than making anyone believe a word out of his mouth.

At the end of the day, the next leader of the NDP has an incredibly difficult job in front of them, and that is making Albertans trust that the NDP can govern Alberta. Nominate a leader who has this hanging over him, a leader donning the clothes of a progressive just so he can lead the opposition while never having lived that party’s values, and you might as well just give up.

I have bit my tongue in recent times, trying to see if there was something I was missing about Naheed. Too many people I hold in too much respect support him and think he’s a serious and credible alternative to Danielle Smith. I have thought long and hard about that, and wondered if I was missing something. This revelation tells me I’m not missing anything. Nenshi will say or do anything to win. He tries to be everything to everybody at all times. And sometimes, you strike gold and you win. More often, being everything to everybody ends with you having nobody who will stand with you when the times get tough.

I have long said that accepting imperfect candidates is better than the reality of bad conservative governments. Nenshi’s disgraceful abandonment of any form of principle has moved me. Nenshi cannot lead a progressive party, and progressives cannot support a man who will so cavalierly seek to destroy collective bargaining. Because if political expediency means he was willing to union bust, there’s no reason to believe he will ever do what’s needed to fix schools, hospitals, and our climate and housing crises.

Please God don’t let this man anywhere near power.