Will the real NDP please stand up? Because I’m not sure what you look like. Come to think of it, I’m not sure the NDP itself knows what it looks like.
The Alberta NDP is a political party undergoing a face lift. And the person holding the scalpel is the new leader, Naheed Nenshi.
The transformation began the moment Nenshi entered the race on March 11, 2024, 14 weeks before being declared the winner on June 22.
He flooded the party with tens of thousands of new members and captured more than 62,000 votes, or 86 per cent of the final ballots. Albertans signed up not to support the old New Democratic Party, but to join a “new” New Democratic Party led by a charismatic and nationally known former mayor of Calgary.
Nenshi’s leadership campaign was short on policy specifics but long on energetic promises to defeat Danielle Smith and the UCP in the next provincial election in 2027.
The NDP was becoming the “Nenshi” Democratic Party.
Nenshi doesn’t like that description. In an interview for this column, he said, “the ‘N’ in NDP doesn’t stand for Nenshi any more than it stood for Notley. It’s a party with a huge diversity of views.”
Except that under Notley’s leadership the Alberta NDP was very much the “Notley” Democratic Party, not just because she built the organization from a rump opposition with four seats into government in 2015 and then emerged from the 2023 election loss with the largest official Opposition in Alberta history. Notley was a walking embodiment of traditional NDP values, social and economic.
Nenshi is still finding his sea legs as leader and doesn’t want to trip himself up three years out from an election.
The NDP under Nenshi, however, is a work in progress. That’s because as leader of a political party Nenshi himself is a work in progress. “I’ve never been in opposition,” said Nenshi, who as Calgary mayor from 2010 to 2021 was his own boss. “We’re thinking really hard about how to reach out to Albertans in new ways. You’ll see a lot of that going forward, both for me and for my caucus colleagues.”
He is happy to bash the UCP government as “immoral and dangerous” while offering up the NDP as a “predictable, dependable and rational” government-in-waiting.
It’s all rather vague. But Nenshi insists he has a plan.
He wants to find a balance between attacking the UCP government while also offering up positive alternatives.
He is determined to flesh out a policy on healthcare, for example, by having MLA Luanne Metz, a medical doctor, travel the province speaking with healthcare stakeholders “to develop a really comprehensive blueprint for the future of healthcare in Alberta. So instead of healthcare decisions being made like a pinball machine based on whatever Danielle Smith heard on Tucker Carlson last week, and completely changing things around, we will be going into 2027 with a fully developed, fully costed program for healthcare.”
In other words, wait and see.
That’s pretty much Nenshi’s answer on many fronts.
While taking questions at a Calgary Chamber of Commerce luncheon in September, Nenshi refused to say where he stands on issues like a federal carbon tax, saying he wants to see who wins the next federal election. “My real goal is to hear from all of you about precisely what you mean and what kind of government would make sense for you,” said Nenshi, in the kind of pandering response offered up by politicians trying to avoid the issue.
Nenshi is still finding his sea legs as leader and doesn’t want to trip himself up or box himself into a corner three years out from an election.
For politicians, being something of a mystery has an upside. They are a blank slate on which voters can project their hopes.
Conversely, blank slates are easy to defile. And the UCP has been busy trying to paint the former mayor as a Trudeau ally who botched Calgary’s Green Line LRT project. They want voters to see him as controversial, a risky choice.
But while that will work for the UCP base, it could otherwise be a hard sell. Nenshi is outspoken, skilled and charismatic. He poses a real threat to the UCP. That’s why so many anti-UCP Albertans, particularly those in Calgary, became members. They saw Nenshi as the best bet to take on Smith and defeat her in 2027.
Electing Nenshi as NDP leader was never about maintaining the course set by Rachel Notley. It was never about shoring up the New Democratic Party but about tearing down the UCP.
Nenshi’s followers boarded the NDP ship en masse and made him captain.
He is now promising to lay out a course to take Albertans to a new, better destination.
We have yet to see the map.
Graham Thomson is a political analyst, member of the Legislature Press Gallery and former Edmonton Journal political columnist.
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