What’s Past is Prologue

The offices of the recently renovated Federal Building on the Alberta Legislature grounds are surprisingly bland. The facade of the structure is so grand and baroque that one expects to find an equally impressive interior. That’s not the case, however, and Rachel Notley was quick to comment on this when I met with her in the offices of the Official Opposition early last fall.

“Taupe should be banned from all colour palettes associated with paint,” she said, laughing, as she looked around the room. “Lovely colour for clothing, but it’s a bit much on every piece of furniture and every wall.”

Although her observation was valid, I suggested the offices still had to be better than those formerly dedicated to the Opposition inside the Annex, the big green outhouse-inspired building northeast of the Legislature proper, a crumbling Stalinist eyesore that was torn down last winter.

“Fair enough, though it had nice windows,” she said. “Anyway, the office I really want back is my old one inside the Legislature itself. I quite liked the Premier’s Office. Let’s just say that I’d like that one back.”

Notley’s likability is still there, but she’s going into this campaign with a much stronger team.

Notley may want that office back and she might even get her wish soon. But a lot has changed since she first sat behind that desk. In fact, the entire Alberta political ecosystem has undergone such radical realignment since her ascension as premier that it’s instructive to cast an eye back simply to realize how much is different.

Just six months before the 2015 election, in mid-October of 2014, Premier Jim Prentice was the leader of a Progressive Conservative party that held 61 of Alberta’s 87 seats. Danielle Smith was the embattled leader of the Official Opposition Wildrose Party, which held 16 seats. Prevailing wisdom was that Prentice was in a strong position for the upcoming 2015 election and that Smith was struggling to retain the support of her own party, let alone that of Albertans at large. Smith herself must have shared that belief, given that she (and 10 other Wildrose MLAs) defected to the PCs later that year, only to then lose her PC nomination in the spring, prompting her to move to talk radio.

And the NDP in the fall of 2014…? On October 17, Brian Mason was the leader of a party that held four seats in the Legislature. No significant reading of politics at the time suggested the NDP were a force to be reckoned with. Mason, while honourable, was uninspiring and had announced he was departing as leader. David Eggen and Rod Loyola, two long-time NDP stalwarts, were running against a third candidate for a leadership vote to be held on October 18 in Edmonton.

Which is when everything changed, because that third candidate was Rachel Notley.

In the months following Notley’s winning the NDP leadership, her direct manner and manifest competence caught the attention of an Alberta population that was rapidly tiring of Conservative entitlement. Notley’s timing turned out to be impeccable, though it wasn’t yet apparent when the writ was dropped for the 2015 election. Prentice still looked the part of premier. But the experienced Calgary pollster Janet Brown thinks back to those days and believes Notley’s rise to power was rooted in the failures and foibles of the PC leaders who came before Prentice, particularly Alison Redford.

“Expectations were so high that when [Redford] wasn’t living up to those expectations, it was doubly problematic,” says Brown. Redford’s popularity cratered amid controversy after controversy, and she was summarily ousted by her own party, just as her predecessor had been. “We had Ed Stelmach and then we had Redford, and then suddenly Albertans started to wonder whether the PCs were capable of providing stable government,” says Brown.

In other words Albertans were starting to experience niggling questions about something they’d never questioned before, namely: Are the PCs automatic? Do I actually need to think about how I might vote? Stelmach didn’t inspire. Redford imploded. Other options then began to worm through the cracks in the dam, such as Danielle Smith’s Wildrose. “And then it’s late 2014,” says Brown, “and suddenly people were, like, ‘Oh, when did the NDP change leaders? Oh, that’s interesting.’ And then they started to get to know Rachel Notley.”

The favourable introduction contributed to her winning the election. But Notley’s problem, once she was in the premier’s office, was that Albertans also started to get to know her team. “Going into that election, the NDP had a lot of NOBs,” says Brown, thankfully choosing to elaborate. “Names On the Ballot. People who just perpetually ran, never expecting to win.”

The NDP team sorely lacked experience, a naïveté that showed. Even Notley admits as much. “I did a lot of delegating to my minister of health when I was [premier],” Notley tells me. “But I would say I was awfully controlling about a lot of other files.”

That, however, was two cycles ago. An eternity. And here we are, preparing for an election in the spring of 2023 after an endless series of surprising and even shocking events. Prentice died in a plane crash on October 13, 2016. Jason Kenney left federal politics to throw his hat in the provincial ring. The PCs merged with the Wildrose in the summer of 2017 to form the UCP. Kenney was elected UCP leader in the fall of 2017. He and his party won the 2019 election. He ruled for three years, during much of which he was the least popular leader in Canada. Kenney was then defenestrated by his own party in 2022, only to be replaced by the political wildfire no amount of controversy seems able to extinguish, that being Danielle Smith. And, of course, Alberta, like everywhere, was simultaneously afflicted by two horrific viruses, COVID and Donald Trump. One of these ripped a hole in the social fabric and damaged our collective psychological well-being, and the other one was related to the flu. Alberta is, in short, an entirely different social and political setting than it was eight years ago. Nothing is the same.

Oh, with one exception, that is. Notley is still around, still leader of the Alberta NDP, and still wants the premier’s chair. The question is: Has she changed, or has Alberta changed, enough that Notley has another shot?

“Actually, I would hope I haven’t changed that much as a person,” Notley says when asked how she’s different going into the 2023 election. “But I’d only been on the job [as NDP leader] five or six months when we went into the 2015 election. In opposition, the decision-making is fairly clear. You’re an advocate. But then when you get into government, you quickly learn that you must become a decision-maker.”

Notley recalls how one of the first calls she got after assuming office was from former Prime Minister Jean Chrétien. They had hardly been political allies, but he wanted to congratulate her. “He gave me a very sage piece of advice,” says Notley, “which I held on to. He said, simply, ‘People are going to be lined up outside of your door, day in, day out, pushing you to make decisions. Don’t make any decision you’re not ready to make. Don’t let them push you into doing that.’ ”

Leah Ward worked with Notley in the premier’s office. “Some things about Rachel will never change,” she says. “She’s steadfastly and immovably committed to the plight of working people and marginalized people. But she’s grown as a leader. I think the success of the NDP is directly related to her putting into practice lessons about how to connect with folks in other parts of the province. But she’s a rural Albertan herself, so it’s not like these things don’t come naturally to her.”

“Success” means not just strong poll numbers for the NDP but the fact that Notley has a more impressive team today than ever before. The party is an entirely different animal, according to Brown. “I don’t know that I can point to too many things that have changed about Rachel Notley,” she says. “But one of the things I kept hearing going into the 2019 election was, ‘I like Rachel, but she’s got a weak team around her.’ What’s changed is that Rachel’s likability is still there, but she’s going into this campaign with a much stronger team around her. You know, the NDP used to have their conventions and whoever drew the short straw was the leader. They’d have an overabundance of baristas on their slate of candidates. But now there are businesspeople, lawyers… I don’t think in 2023 people are going to say Rachel’s got a weak team.”

“We’ve got a much more seasoned team now,” says Notley. “Both in terms of the people who were elected and the candidates stepping forward for us now. That will be good. We’ll be able to move into a less centralized means of governance.” In other words, it will be less about Rachel Notley than about the NDP team, a team no longer full of NOBs. Nagwan Al-Guneid, running in Calgary-Glenmore, is the director at the Business Renewables Centre Canada and has a master of science in sustainable energy development. Court Ellingson, running in Calgary-Foothills, is former vice-president strategy of Calgary Economic Development. Karen Shaw, running in Morinville-St. Albert, is a former four-term councillor for Sturgeon County. Kevin Van Tighem, running in Livingstone-Macleod, is a former superintendent of Banff National Park. These are just a few of the new faces, and there is not a barista among them.

Notley’s decentralized governance strategy only holds, of course, if all goes according to plan. The evidence suggests as much to date. The fall 2022 NDP convention drew a huge crowd. Fundraising is through the roof, with the NDP raising more money than the UCP in 2020, 2021 and 2022 ($5-million, $6-million and $7-million respectively). Most NDP MLAs have returned to run again. Many ridings saw hotly contested NDP nomination races, in some cases for the first time ever.

Broader growth across the province has also helped Notley ward off the far-left-radical tag that conservatives have long tried to pin on both her and the   party. “Oh, sure,” she tells me, from her too-taupe Opposition offices. “We hear that. But we just tell people we’re listening to their concerns and putting forward evidence-based ideas about how to move forward on the issues that matter.”

Is “evidence-based” perhaps a shot at Smith? Notley just smiles when asked about her chief opponent’s disorienting relationship to reality.

“What I will say is that we’re hearing from many lifelong conservatives who are now telling us, ‘This just isn’t for me anymore,’” she says. “Some aren’t sure what they’re going to do. Some say they’ll vote for us. But they’re definitely saying, ‘I’ve been a conservative my whole life, and I don’t see myself in this party anymore. I don’t know what they’re up to.’”

“And that’s not me misremembering three people over the course of three years saying it,” Notley adds. “Every single day people are saying that.”

Leah Ward says one of the great mistakes of the Kenney/Smith stance is to assume that Albertans welcome “extreme right-wing experiments.” Albertans, she argues, are in fact quite progressive. Identifying as conservative is more of a habit, part of one’s cultural identity, rather than a belief system. Prentice got it wrong. Kenney got it wrong. And Ward thinks Smith is getting it wrong.

Notley says many centrist conservatives will feel pushed so far by Smith that they’ll simply step over the line into the NDP. And she’ll welcome them and work with them. “I just think we’re stronger as a province when we work together. Many Albertans agree on that. Healthcare, public education, infrastructure.… when we pool our resources, we can accomplish more. And, quite frankly, conservative governments in the past would agree with that statement. But that’s just not what’s going on right now in the current iteration of the conservative party here.”

The Alberta political ecosystem has undergone a radical realignment since Notley’s ascension as premier in 2015.

The question of what is going on in the UCP at the moment is difficult to answer. Smith’s activities contain elements of farce, brinkmanship and calculation. Her political strategy appears to consist of finding as many walls as possible to throw spaghetti at to see what sticks. She’s going to do what she’s going to do, and Notley can’t do anything about that.

But what Notley does control is how she reacts to Smith’s performance. Finding the right response pitch will be crucial. The reality is that Notley must walk a very fine line when trying to comment on Smith’s suspect judgment. Does Smith occasionally say things that are irrational? Absolutely. In mid-December, for example, Smith spoke in the Legislature about the Sovereignty Act and compared the way Ottawa treats Albertans to how Indigenous people have been treated under the Indian Act, demonstrating an insensitivity matched only by a profound lack of insight into the history of her province and country. She met with Indigenous leaders the next day. Afterwards those leaders said, “It was clear from our discussions that Premier Smith does not understand treaty or our inherent rights, nor does she respect them.”

Smith can be counted on to showcase her tenuous grip on reality, but the danger for Notley in pointing out every gonzo pseudo-fact and unconstitutional throat-clearing is that if everything is crazy then nothing is crazy. Just as the Orange One down south made it his daily business to keep the outrage machine working non-stop, thereby diluting the impact of any single scandal, so too will the voter tire of Notley and the NDP pointing out daily whatever new ridiculous thing Smith has done or said.

Janet Brown acknowledges that such a path would be strewn with landmines for Notley, and she thinks discipline is called for. “Notley will be making a bad tactical decision if she goes after every gaffe, every puddle that Smith steps in,” says Brown. “She’s got to look like the government in waiting. Because if she just stands up there and says Danielle Smith is crazy, people might turn around and say, hey, you know what, maybe we need a little crazy. Please excuse my language, but before the last election we did a set of focus groups with conservatives, NDs, undecided, and in every focus group they all used the same language to describe Kenney. The NDs said, ‘He’s a dick.’ The conservatives said, ‘He’s a bit of a dick.’ And the undecided voters said, ‘He’s a dick, but maybe that’s just what we need right now. Maybe we need someone to go be a bit of a jerk in Ottawa.’ If the message is just that Smith’s crazy, that’s not going to be enough, because maybe people like her kind of craziness. To me, it’s whether or not her crazy is going to be detrimental to the economy.”

Notley has certainly demonstrated a degree of restraint between the time Smith won the UCP leadership and today, but the temptation will be strong in the election campaign. “I would hope they’re cautious,” says Leah Ward. “It’s got to be about a focus on NDP priorities rather than a focus on Danielle Smith. The reality is that Smith is using tactics and techniques used by Trump, and people will see that for themselves. The task will be to call her out while always offering an alternative.”

For her part, Notley says her focus will be on offering predictability and stability. “It’s about trust and competence,” she says. “We have this fabulous opportunity, which is new, a once-in-four-generations opportunity for an opposition party to say, ‘We’ve been in government, and, looking back, we had no scandals. We did what we said we’d do. We were careful with your money. We led you through times that none of us expected. And so you don’t have to be worried about us being at the helm, and you can trust us.’”

“[People] might not always agree with us. …I’m not suggesting we’re all things to all people. I think debate and disagreement about certain policy issues, that’s the heart and soul of politics. The key is to do it with honesty, integrity and facts, common facts, that people agree are real.”

The facts reference, to tie Smith to Trumpian tactics, is no accident. But this election will be about much more than Notley vs. Smith in a battle of styles and rhetoric. Notley is up against certain electoral realities. Smith’s words since winning the UCP leadership make it clear she’s intensely aware of her path to victory—sweep the rural ridings and pick off as many Calgary ridings as possible. Smith knows how to read the numbers and understands that Route One to an election win is to create an amped-up end-times either/or scenario, so that the rural vote is cowed into voting overwhelmingly UCP and enough Calgary conservatives just can’t bring themselves to vote NDP.

Say what you want about Danielle Smith, she does not incite fence-sitting. She creates significant distance between her and her opponents, expressly for the purpose of differentiation. She wants Them or Us. It’s less about policy than picking your team. She has clearly observed the Republican party in the US, where all manner of unpalatable activity is deemed tolerable to voters so long as their team wins (evangelical Christians, for instance, voting for a vulgar serial philanderer only because they knew it was their best chance to have Roe v. Wade overturned).

If the election devolves (in Smith’s eyes) into a nuanced policy debate, she will be exposed as a lightweight running a party whose only policy is confrontation. But if she can make the election a fire and brimstone cultural earthquake with the very foundation and future of our province at stake, then she stands a much better chance. Why? Because fear and anger work. Fear motivates. Anger provokes. And Smith knows the numbers don’t favour her unless she can provoke a certain portion of the electorate (rural and urban white voters) into fearing the loss of true Albertan culture (whatever that is) and being angry at those who are trying to take it away.

Ward believes rural voters aren’t that much different in their concerns than urban voters, and that NDP policies and messages in areas such as healthcare, affordability and the economy are in fact in line with rural thinking. The issue isn’t the message but the messenger, and when the messenger—Notley—is being painted as a radical left-winger intent on stripping you of every individual right you’ve ever had and collectivizing the economy Soviet-style, it makes it somewhat more challenging to get that message heard.

The advantage Notley has, however, is that she has increasingly become a known quantity who Albertans believe is rational and steady. People all over the province, no matter their stripe, like Notley. The disadvantage is that they don’t like her party as much as they like her. Ironically, says Brown, “when we ask people where they identify on the left–right spectrum and ask questions about values, people tend to overestimate how conservative they are. Maybe this is where Danielle Smith has us all outsmarted. Yes, we have growing urbanization in the province [which favours the NDP], but when you look at the distribution of seats, Smith could easily win a majority government with a lower popular vote than Notley.”

The NDP’s most pressing electoral issue is that most of their growth has come in areas where they’re already popular. It doesn’t make any difference in terms of seats if you win a riding in Edmonton by 5,000 votes or 25,000 votes. Smith has made no secret of the fact that she’s concentrating her energy in rural ridings and in Calgary, in which city the UCP held 21 of 24 seats at the time the legislature was dissolved. She doesn’t need votes anywhere else. So, can Notley counter that baked-in UCP advantage?

If the expected patterns hold, the NDP will have to sweep Edmonton and immediate vicinity, as well as the Lethbridge ridings and Banff-Kananaskis, and then hope Calgary has enough doubt about Smith to break 15 or so seats the NDP’s way. The 14 Calgary seats lost by the NDP in 2019 are close enough to be very much in play in 2023, as are a handful of other Calgary seats—particularly given that the Alberta Party could be less of a vote-splitting factor this time around and the Alberta Liberals, a relative non-factor in 2015, are effectively extinct today.

Notley recognizes the challenge. “I think we’re just going to have to continue trying to connect with Albertans where they are, in their communities and on their doorsteps,” she says, “listening to their priorities and convincing them that they can count on us. It’s not rocket science, really. Do we need 50 per cent of the popular vote? Probably not. But really, it’s just about offering up realistic, genuine solutions that we’re capable of delivering on, and hopefully convincing people that’s why they can trust us to deliver.”

A lot will depend on Smith’s performance too. Brown feels Notley’s chances improved the day Smith won the UCP leadership. “Her prospects are better against Danielle Smith than they would’ve been against any other UCP leadership candidate,” she says. “But that doesn’t mean it’s a sure thing for the NDP. Rachel is very popular, but it’s going to be hard for the NDP to crack 40 per cent of the vote. It’ll take a lot of traditional Tories deciding the UCP just isn’t their party anymore. For Smith, with all the baggage she brings, it’s going to take a lot of people deciding to overlook what they dislike about her. I see both an NDP victory and a UCP victory as very plausible.”

When pressed about how she might run the upcoming campaign, Notley offered a hint at how she may try to back the UCP into an ideological corner. It all has to do with her theory (not hers alone) that the UCP is built solely to make a short-term run at power and isn’t set up to operate as a functioning party capable of governing responsibly. “The UCP is very inward looking,” says Notley. “There’s a lot of navel-gazing going on. Whereas if you look back at what conservatives were like under Peter Lougheed, they were outward facing, connecting with Albertans, saying, ‘We are you, you are us. We are the same thing.’ And there was that real, strong connection. I don’t think that’s what you get with this current party. The things the UCP is talking about are not what matter to Albertans.”

The Sovereignty Act, an Alberta police force, an Alberta pension plan, an obsession with protecting anti-vaxxers. These are not issues that most Albertans are particularly interested in (or would even trust the UCP with if they were). And yet that’s what the UCP insists on talking about, she says, unless they’re talking about even more bizarre things.

“My own personal theory,” she says, “is that they want power for the sake of dismantling government. Even if they embarrass themselves, their overall objective is just to dismantle government. As a result, they’re not measuring success by whether they make life better for Albertans; they’re measuring it by how close they get to their ideological goalposts.… We’re being led by a government that hates government.”

Notley laughs when she describes as rather “boring” her insistence on dealing in such curiosities as facts and logic. She says her staff teased her in years past about the inherent lack of excitement around her predictability and stability mantra. In this regard, she hasn’t changed. But she resolutely believes Albertans are shedding old habits. She says most of us see things differently now and are more like her than like Danielle Smith.

She ended our conversation by telling me that every time she attends the Calgary Stampede or the Edmonton Folk Music Festival or even various rural events, people continually approach her and say something to the effect of “You’ve got to win!”

“I know!” she always says back to them. “But this is a group project!”

 

Curtis Gillespie has written five books of fiction and non-fiction and somewhere north of 100 magazine articles.

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