Smith, NDP, And The Battle For Alberta

The NDP's Path

The night after Danielle Smith was elected leader of the UCP, and thereby Premier-designate of Alberta, I got a call from someone asking for a brief rundown of Danielle Smith’s craziness. The call was from someone who remembered thinking she was a nutter, but couldn’t, in the moment, remember why she thought that.

The list is pretty easy to give – she wanted to give tainted meat to the homeless, claimed cigarettes had health benefits, she ran the 2012 Wildrose campaign into the ground by refusing to condemn a candidate who claimed that homosexuals will spend eternal damnation in a “Lake of Fire” for their sins, and this year she claimed that, amongst others, cancer patients could have avoided getting cancer with personal responsibility.

Oh, and she’s proposing the most blatantly unconstitutional legislation seen in Canada in the Charter era.

In any other province, electing a leader this batshit crazy, and this far divorced from the political centre, would be death, If the BC NDP elect the non-Eby candidate (I’m really not going to pretend I’m following that showshit very closely), then I’ll probably write a column saying that the BC Liberals are favoured to win in ’24. In any other province (okay, not Sasky either), a candidate this extreme would be dead on arrival. But it’s Alberta.

For the Alberta NDP to win, they need to win 12 of the seats in green on my scoreboard here. Spoiler alert: there’s 11 seats in Calgary on here, which essentially means the NDP needs a Calgary strategy to win the next election. If you think you’ve heard me babble on about this before, the election math proves me right, shut up – the ballgame is in Calgary and the NDP need a more convincing argument about what a post-oil Calgary economy looks like, because as I keep explaining, even though the oil’s up north, the money from oil flows to Calgary, and that’s why you get socially liberal Calgarians who in any other city would vote for left wing parties vote for conservatives.

That said, Smith is being talked about by a certain kind of Alberta progressive as so bad of a candidate and so bad of a Premier that the NDP might be able to get away without doing the hard work of vision or planning, essentially because the UCP will implode and the NDP will be the default government. That assumption is, I think, disastrously stupid, because there’s two very different ways to handle Smith’s controversies and scandals – and I am fucking terrified the NDP will choose the wrong one.

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In 2019, the NDP – desperate to paint the UCP as a dangerous party – tried to make everything a Lake Of Fire moment. Every controversy from everyone was found, the NDP would demand that Jason Kenney condemn the candidate and the remarks, and then nothing would actually happen. It was political theatrics, but more importantly, it felt like a pale imitation of a strategy that worked the first time because of organic outrage, and in 2019 felt like the political equivalent of trying to reform the Heartbreakers without Tom Petty. In 2023, Smith will present the same problem for the NDP – they will be able to play outrage of the day around all of Smith’s ludicrous past views, and if they do so, they will lose the next election.

Smith presents this nominally really appealing target, but the problem is, if the next campaign becomes about “isn’t Danielle Smith a bit of a shitty person?” and not “Danielle Smith is a bad Premier”, then the UCP have won. Bad people win elections in the world because partisans are willing to excuse character flaws for their policy agenda. Be it Trump and right wing judges, Boris and Brexit, or even Trudeau and blackface, “[insert leader] did a bad thing” just isn’t a good message anymore. What is a good message is that Smith’s stupidity and idiocy is going to cost Albertans.

The NDP’s black hole is their economic credibility – they took over during an oil crash, and they didn’t get lucky and get a oil high during their tenure – and the only way they can win is if they convince small-c economic conservatives in Calgary that their economic interests are best protected with the NDP, not the UCP. The problem is, while the Alberta NDP pitch themselves to voters as a centrist party – and their leadership and messaging is centrist in nature – their activists and most vocal supporters are avowed progressives who don’t want to kowtow to economic conservatives in Calgary. The problem is, they have to.

Alberta politics can essentially be separated into 3, roughly equal groups of voters – conservatives whose main interests are culture war fights (gay rights, abortion, COVID anti-restrictions), conservatives who hold socially liberal views on those culture war issues but prioritize low taxes and a lax regulatory framework, and then left wingers. From 1971 to 2008, the Alberta right won because the first two groups mostly voted together through a marriage of convenience – the rural cultural conservatives got their cultural conservatism and the cities used the oil money to fund no sales taxation and a flat tax.

In 2012, the centre-right won by squeezing the left against the right, which kept the PCs in power, and then in 2015, the NDP won by getting some social liberals who were pissed about the instability of the Stelmach-Redford-Prentice years to finally back them (and through vote splits, although at 41% of the vote it’s touch and go whether or not a united right wing would have saved Prentice – there might have been more moderate slippage to the NDP had Prentice been leading a party with right wing wackjobs).

In 2019, the electorate reverted to form – the NDP got their roughly 1/3rd of the vote for left wing parties, and then the UCP got the marriage of convenience coalition back again. With Smith as leader, the chances of a right wing vote split in any meaningful form is gone – which means the NDP needs to win a fair fight if they want to form government. Are they ready to? I don’t think so, but I would love to be wrong.

The NDP seems ill-equipped for the sort of disciplined campaign they need to run to beat Smith, at this point. They’re running an opposition in a very Ed Miliband-esque way – very good at scandal of the week, very bad at projecting what an alternative government would be proposing, but even beyond that, it’s erratic. It’s bouncy – from hospital shortages to teachers being mad to Smith saying loony things, the NDP doesn’t say anything wrong, but it’s all disjointed and disconnected. The comparison to Ontario is cheap, because here at least Notley manages to make the case against the UCP, but Doug Ford won in large part because there wasn’t anyone offering a coherent narrative except Ford bad.

The NDP’s problem is in part a reaction to 2015, when they did offer a bold, intellectually honest vision with Andrew Leach’s commission into carbon pricing. They don’t want to offer another one of those to the opposition to beat their heads in with, and I get that – but the problem is, without it, it’s a vacuum of policy or ambition.

Put another way, what is the point of a vote for the Alberta NDP? I know what it is in many ways – a vote against the Alberta Sovereignty Act and whatever other nonsense Smith will do while Premier – but I don’t know what the NDP would actually do. Take the NDP’s opposition to for-profit care and public money going into it for an example, and their general view to pay nurses more. Why is it that the NDP’s opposition to this is pitched as protecting public healthcare – an ephemeral notion – and not as a form of tax? “Kenney’s forcing you to pay more because he won’t just hire some damn nurses” is a much better, sharper line of attack than anything the NDP has on the issue.

The NDP needs to not frame their attacks on notions of fairness, but on matters of cold, hard consequences. The dirty little secret of left wing politics is that there are few altruistic leftwingers – most people attracted to left wing politics do so because of an immediate need for protection. Be it the fact that gay marriage support only spiked as more and more people knew a gay person, or the fact that left wing parties rise in support the second cuts to welfare or government support hit them, people don’t vote for left wing causes for altruistic purposes.

“Lack of nurses mean you’ll be stuck in waiting rooms and not with your kids”, “discontent amongst teachers mean your kid can’t play sports or do Reach For The Top”, and “Building a more oil resilient economy will save us from needing future tax rises when oil tanks again” are arguments the NDP could make within their current policy mix, but it’s never this sharp. Hell, you want to argue against the Alberta Sovereignty Act? Don’t quote constitutional law profs, quote economists.

I am the son of two Quebecers who left the province because of the language wars and the threat that what ended up being the Parizeau Government would make the province unlivable for Anglos. Quebec suffered hugely for the constitutional wars of the 80s and 90s, in large part because the uncertainty drove people away. From 1981 to 2006, Quebec’s economy grew 2.3% a year – a seemingly gaudy number, until you realize the rest of Canada grew at 3% a year. By any metric – population growth, employment, anything you want to use – Quebec lagged far behind because of the constitutional wars. There was a brain drain, because anyone who could get the fuck out of dodge did. I know – I’m a living fucking example.

This is the argument the NDP needs to make against the Sovereignty Act – not that it’s an unconstitutional power grab that won’t work, but that the uncertainty it will cause will send the best and the brightest to Vancouver or Toronto. “Alberta wants to bring the best of Canada to Alberta – the best way to start that is to stop trying to mess with our place in Canada” is a lot better than a lecture on Section 92 of the British North America Act.

The voters the NDP need are open to listening to them, but right now, the NDP aren’t giving them a message they will hear well. Notions of fairness will go over their heads because nobody gives a fuck about fairness as a first order concern. The NDP need to argue against the UCP not from first principles, but from an uncomfortable position for them – pandering to the fact that rich people don’t like wasting money. “An NDP government will make things cheaper for everyone” is an argument the NDP doesn’t instinctively like, because it’s an argument that doesn’t view rich and successful people as their audience. In Alberta, it is.

Those 11 Calgary seats and Sherwood Park is probably the NDP’s easiest path back to Government. The winnable 2019 UCP voters that they need to vote NDP this time are mostly above average in wealth, they hold socially liberal views on abortion and gay rights, they got vaccinated as soon as possible, and more generally, they have a comfort with modern Alberta (and modern Canada). I’ve written this in the context of the US before, but it’s much harder to vote for parties of the right when you golf with the gay couple two streets over and your weekly bridge game is more multi-racial than an Asian fusion restaurant’s menu. It’s just harder.

What keeps these voters voting for conservatives in Alberta is a distrust of the economic competence of the NDP, and they have months to do it against a Government that will be preeningly self indulgent and chasing its own tail on the constitution. The UCP have given the NDP an opening to win the next election. I have no faith the NDP can take it, but if they want to win, this is how they do it.