It started as a race to replace Rachel Notley as the leader of the Alberta NDP. Now, with former Calgary mayor Naheed Nenshi’s official entry, it’s become an existential crisis for Alberta’s progressive politicians. Just how far are they willing to go to beat Danielle Smith and the UCP in the next election — and what will they look like if they do?
Nenshi made no secret of his desire to make the Alberta NDP’s proverbial tent as big and broad as possible. "I want folks to feel comfortable voting for the Alberta NDP regardless of how they vote federally,” he told the Western Wheel’s Amir Said in an interview. “I want federal NDP voters and Liberal voters and Green voters and PPC voters and Conservative voters to all feel like the Alberta NDP is still a home for them provincially, and one way of doing that might be to ensure in our party that we are truly independent."
That might mean severing ties with the federal party, a long-simmering internal conversation that Nenshi just put to a boil. “I think tying us to people whose values we might not entirely share, that we don't have control over, costs more than it benefits.” The other candidates in the race to replace Notley have mooted a more diplomatic version of this message, most notably Rakhi Pancholi and Kathleen Ganley, but none have taken it on as directly as Nenshi. Now, whether any of them like it or not, this will be the de-facto ballot question when members (old and new) cast their votes in June.
This wouldn’t be nearly as controversial in a Liberal or Conservative leadership contest, where new members are always the coin of the realm. But New Democrats are a different species of political animal, and they have always guarded their ideological borders more carefully. Hence, the eternal struggle for many New Democrats: Do they want to make the party as big and broad as possible or do they want to police and purity test new members in order to safeguard their core principles?
This played out most recently at the 2016 federal NDP convention in Edmonton, where Thomas Mulcair was tossed out as leader after one election and the “Leap Manifesto” took centre stage. It was impossible to miss the contrast (and conflict) between Mulcair’s pragmatism and the Leap Manifesto’s more radical calls to action, and it foreshadowed some of the internal divisions that defined the Notley government’s four years in power.
Formal federal NDP founder Tommy Douglas famously articulated his own position on the matter more than 40 years ago at an event celebrating the 50th anniversary of the 1933 Regina Manifesto. “If I could press a button tonight and bring a million people into this party, and knew that those people were coming in for some ulterior motive but they didn’t understand the kind of society we’re trying to build, I wouldn’t press the button because we don’t want those kinds of people.”
Nenshi’s button won’t bring a million new people into the Alberta NDP, but when he presses it — and he will — the party will see a surge of new members. Ironically, it might help other candidates attract a few new members of their own. “My membership sales go up every time he talks about entering the race,” Sarah Hoffman, the former deputy premier and candidate closest to Notley, told the Globe and Mail’s Carrie Tait. “They are worried about somebody from the outside who hasn’t ever really called himself a New Democrat being the leader of the party. They are motivated to be unapologetically New Democrat.” Julia Hayter, a Calgary MLA who is openly backing former justice minister Ganley, fired her own shots at the former mayor. “We have a guy stepping in to join our leadership race — someone who barely backed us when it mattered. Just like his endorsement, Naheed Nenshi is arriving at the last minute.”
In the end, though, these sorts of purity tests aren’t likely to matter to the people Nenshi is signing up. They don’t care that he hasn’t been a longtime NDP member. They don’t care that he hasn’t knocked on enough doors for them. And they don’t care that he hasn’t been suitably supportive of the party or its leader in past elections. All they care about is that they believe he represents the party’s best chance of defeating the UCP in 2027 and the province’s best chance of electing a government whose existence doesn’t revolve around fighting with Ottawa and rejecting the increasingly obvious realities of climate change.
If the other candidates in this race want to stop Nenshi, they’ll have to change that belief. They’ll have to prove to members that they can deliver the biggest win in 2027, not Nenshi, and that his political ceiling isn’t as high as his supporters might want to pretend — especially outside of Calgary. Most importantly, they’ll need to show their vision of both the party and the province’s future is more compelling than his.
That won’t be easy. It might not even be possible. But one thing is for sure: now that Nenshi is officially a member of the Alberta NDP, they’ll have to reckon with him one way or another.
Can Naheed Nenshi win over the NDP?
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14.03.2024
It started as a race to replace Rachel Notley as the leader of the Alberta NDP. Now, with former Calgary mayor Naheed Nenshi’s official entry, it’s become an existential crisis for Alberta’s progressive politicians. Just how far are they willing to go to beat Danielle Smith and the UCP in the next election — and what will they look like if they do?
Nenshi made no secret of his desire to make the Alberta NDP’s proverbial tent as big and broad as possible. "I want folks to feel comfortable voting for the Alberta NDP regardless of how they vote federally,” he told the Western Wheel’s Amir Said in an interview. “I want federal NDP voters and Liberal voters and Green voters and PPC voters and Conservative voters to all feel like the Alberta NDP is still a home for them provincially, and one way of doing that might be to ensure in our party that we are truly independent."
That might mean severing ties with the federal party, a long-simmering internal conversation that Nenshi just put to a boil. “I think tying us to people whose values we might not entirely share, that we don't have control over, costs more than it benefits.” The other candidates in the race to replace Notley have mooted a more diplomatic version of this message, most notably Rakhi Pancholi........
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