What Is The Point Of The Alberta NDP?

On Cowardice

What is the point of the Alberta NDP?

I know what the point of it is, in some amount of practicality – they’re a not-Conservative party designed to smooth over the very obvious divisions between the market liberals who vote for Trudeau federally and the socialists of the University of Alberta campus associations. They’re a compromise around the basic, central belief that Rachel Notley is Good, and that conservatives are Bad, which worked when Jim Prentice ran a shit campaign in 2015 and the right split the vote. It spectacularly didn’t work in 2019, when Jason Kenney was Not Notley and that was enough for 55% of the vote, and now the question is whether or not it’s enough in 2023, especially if it’s Danielle Smith.

I don’t have a strong take on whether the increasing consensus that it’s Smith is correct or not – I thought at the launch of this that whoever won the intra-party primary between her and Brian Jean would win the leadership, and I thought he had a slight edge, but it’s not like I was ever in any firm about it. I think the first basic insight – that this is a race between the candidates of God, Guns, and telling Ottawa to go fuck themselves – is correct, but I have no way of telling whether Jean is still in the race for that slot in the final 2.

The good thing about this is that Smith is by far the worst General Election candidate, so unless something sizably changes, I’m going to frame this site’s coverage around a Smith leadership, on the explicit basis that any other UCP Leader would outperform her. This way, I basically get to focus on the one of the three possible combinations likeliest to produce a close outcome, and my readers can do the mental adjustments for themselves for a Jean or Toews leadership.

What is also good is that Smith is the candidate who gives us the best chance to work through the very serious question that this column starts with – what is the point of the Alberta NDP?

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Probably the best way to showcase the complete incoherence of the Alberta NDP has to be Notley’s Twitter account, which oscillates wildly from proclaiming the endless horrors of Kenney and the UCP’s Alberta to a lot of tweets whose throughline is “look at me, tweeting about regular people stuff! Aren’t I so normal?” Just today, she has gone from climate emergency to ambulance shortages to … musicians releasing music for cassette players in the span of 5 hours, which is a choice. Not one that I’d make, but one that makes complete sense when you think about who she needs to vote for her at the next election.

Notley needs to gain at minimum a dozen seats in Calgary, and the voters in those seats if she pulled it off would be a very diverse array of ideologies. She needs to win over strident leftwingers who think that the sin of the last Notley government was that it was too friendly to the oil patch, she needs to win over Federal Liberals who like her moderation compared to most other Dippers, and she needs to win over socially liberal fiscal conservatives who want tax cuts, and in many cases are indirectly wealthy because of the oil boom.

What’s the best solution to the capacity issues in the health care system? To some, it would be more government intervention and more government spending to boost it, and to a bunch of others it would be private operators fulfilling the service – while ensuring that it is free at the point of use for Albertans. Those two views are oceans apart, but they’re going to be views held by a theoretical winning NDP coalition next year. Repeat the trick across climate policy, education policy, what to do with the proceeds of this oil surplus, and you see a party that is strung together by a thread.

Why does Notley’s Twitter feed resemble that of a blogger for the Edmonton equivalent of BlogTO? Because this is the only shit the NDP can actually coalesce around. Their connective tissue of their coalition is a mile wide and an inch deep, and if there was a real fight on, say, Telco policy, then they would risk alienating someone. It’s much easier to just shit on Rogers than to propose ABTel, and so, the NDP keeps the shaky coalition together by doing nothing.

In 2015, the NDP had a courageous climate plan which a lot of them have blamed for losing, so now they’re just avoiding any firm details and any firm commitments beyond saying they care about climate change. Wait, that’s not true, Notley attacked Trudeau’s climate plan as unachievable in the amount of time he wants. They’re stuck in this no-man’s land on climate policy where they can’t go as far pro-oil as the median voter in Alberta and they can’t stick with the policy they had in 2019, because they’re convinced this will cost them again, so now they’re stuck.

Honestly, they’re at the point where picking either fucking answer would be better than this morass of shit, because the NDP look like cowards on this. They need to piss or get off the pot, either go to the electorate with a bold plan that people won’t like but will respect you for having the intestinal fortitude to stick to, or they need to junk it, say that they were wrong to support a carbon tax, and take the view of the median voter. But this middle ground is nowhere for them, because all it does it remind everyone that they stand for nothing firm.

I have been harping on this for literally months now, but what the fuck is the NDP’s plan for Calgary in a post Peak Oil world? I know I sound like a broken record here, but oil has run Calgary for years even if it’s a second order effect. Everyone has benefited from the oil boom whether they themselves work for an oil company – either from an incredibly tight labour market in the early 2010s allowing for huge wage hikes, or from the low taxes that oil has enabled – but even more than that, the people who the NDP needs to win over all have taken oil money in some form or fashion.

If you work in a white collar profession – law, banking, accounting, academia, whatever – you have been paid with oil money. Lawyers earn their bonuses from the oil companies, bankers trade the oil companies, accountants make sure the oil companies pay as little tax as possible, academics get grants from the oil companies all the time. If your response to this is that it’s a deeply perverse set of incentives that end up locking in a certain amount of support for the industry out of sheer self interest, you’d be right! But it’s also up to the NDP to win in spite of this, and there’s no evidence they’ve thought about this in a coherent way at all.

I like the Alberta NDP in a lot of ways, but this is why if you put a gun to my head and asked who I think wins, a Smith-led UCP or a Notley-led NDP, it’s the UCP and I barely hesitate. I get that Smith’s campaign is a trainwreck entirely designed to piss off as many educated, socially liberal Calgarians as humanly possible, and it might end up being that she is such a fucking clusterfuck of a Premier in her few short months that none of this ends up mattering, but the NDP are going to lose their best chance to get back into office out of intellectual nothingness and cowardice.

But hey, at least nobody ever disagrees about anything.