I didn’t immediately recognize the woman in a toque and red and black plaid coat, but she remembered me. It was Tania, my other daughter’s one-time preschool teacher, now a public elementary school teacher and volunteer with the campaign to recall local MLA—and Minister of Education—Demetrios Nicolaides. She introduced another volunteer, Trevor, a big-shouldered man in a red “When We Fight, We Win!” shirt. He turned out to be my older daughter’s former Grade 1 gym teacher. Small world.

We chatted about the new recall campaign, ballooning K–12 class sizes, the ongoing teachers strike, the connection among all of these. “We do have a bit more time on our hands these days,” Trevor joked. “But we’re not all teachers,” Tania said. Earlier that day I’d read in the news that “Recall Nicolaides” had been started by an oil and gas geophysicist.

I hadn’t realized, however, that the campaign was already out collecting signatures. Politics in Alberta these days moves fast.

A young couple with a baby was filling out the petition—name, address, contact info, confirmation of vote eligibility, date, signature. A pickup truck honked as it pulled up. A man in tan overalls hopped out and joined the line. Tania gestured to the table, with its pens and clipboards. “You live in the riding,” she said. “Are you going to sign?” My six-year-old was grabbing my arm. She was cold. She was hungry. One second is over! Maybe next time, I told Tania.

In fact, I had questions before I was willing to add my name. Try to remove our MLA, outside of an election What exactly would we be signing up for?

A frequent criticism in Alberta is that our political representatives face too little accountability. “When most of us stink at our jobs, we get sent packing,” wrote the Canadian Taxpayers Federation in 2020. “[But] that standard doesn’t apply to politicians.” Citizens’ main recourse is elections. Between elections, leaders are reluctant to sanction MLAs for fear of damaging their party “brand” or undermining caucus solidarity. MLAs are reluctant to criticize leaders, who could refuse to sign their nomination papers. But citizens can try to hold politicians accountable in another way. Recall votes—found in almost two dozen countries, most famously at the state level in California (which has had 182 recall campaigns!)—are a way for citizens to take charge. They decide whether or not their elected representatives should be removed before their term is up.

Recall reflects the idea that MLAs are delegates of electors, morally bound by constituents’ preferences. If enough constituents are dissatisfied with an MLA’s performance, they can remove that MLA from office. Recall requires limits to prevent frivolous use. Californians’ recall efforts failed for decades before governor Gray Davis was removed in 2003, in a contentious campaign The Guardian dubbed “a circus fit for the fruit and nut state.”

Albertans have long favoured recall. Premier William Aberhart enacted recall in 1936, only to kill the law after the people of High River made him one of its first targets. In the 1990s Reform demanded recall. So did the provincial Liberals. Recall “gives people an element of control over their politicians,” said leader Laurence Decore. “It also gives MLAs the power to tell their leader they can’t vote for a bill, because their constituents wouldn’t stand for it.”

With recall, citizens decide whether or not their representative should be removed before their term is up.

Then along came Jason Kenney. On the 2019 campaign trail he said his government “would introduce a Recall Act allowing voters to fire their MLA in between elections if they’ve lost the public’s trust.” (For clarity he tweeted FIRE in all-caps.) In 2021 his promise—applied to mayors and councillors too—became law. It would be a two-step process. Collect enough signatures, and you trigger a yes/no vote. If constituents vote the politician out, you trigger a by-election.

Kenney’s legislation was criticized as both vindictive and token. It seemed aimed at municipal and NDP politicians, a tool to silence progressive voices. But the National Post’s Colby Cosh, a recall champion, called the law “weaksauce.” A campaign required valid signatures from 40 per cent of a constituency’s voters: for MLAs, often close to 16,000 names; for mayors, hundreds of thousands. Organizers had only 60 days. They couldn’t launch a recall campaign until 18 months after an election and not within six months of the next one.

Proving left- and right-wing critics alike correct, the first target of recall, in 2024, was Calgary mayor Jyoti Gondek. The campaign collected 69,344 names, or only 5.4 per cent of the city’s population. Organizer Landon Johnston called the threshold “always impossible.” But the stigma clung to Gondek, who then finished third in the 2025 mayoral race. Johnston parlayed the spotlight into a successful run for councillor in Ward 14. And the campaign, wrote the Calgary Herald’s Rob Breakenridge, “exposed some of the shortcomings of the recall process itself.”

A week or so after my chat at the car wash, I was passing the Bowness Ratepayers Scout & Guide Hall and saw a familiar roadside table and signs. I’d just read in the news that recall papers had been served for Airdrie-East MLA Angela Pitt. I’d seen a video of Calgary-North West MLA Rajan Sawhney abandoning the podium as her audience chants “Re-call! Re-call! Re-call!” A website calling itself “Operation Total Recall” claimed that many more such campaigns were in the works.

One reason for newfound interest in recall was that Danielle Smith had changed Kenney’s rules. Campaigns could now start sooner, just a year after an election. Volunteers had an extra month to gather names. The signature threshold could be lower too, based now on previous voter turnout rather than electorate size. Recall Nicolaides was suddenly no longer alone. I pulled over to ask the volunteers how they felt about this.

On this evening, Tania and another volunteer were confirming by flashlight that a woman who wanted to sign did in fact live in the riding. When the lineup eased, I asked them: “Have you seen the Total Recall website?” They laughed. Tania downplayed their influence. “But something’s definitely happening,” the other volunteer said. “I think the Forever Canadian campaign opened up a lot of eyes.” (Former deputy premier Thomas Lukaszuk’s citizen-led anti-separation petition had amassed 456,000 signatures.) “And then the notwithstanding clause—that just blew it up.”

In late October 2025 Smith’s government had invoked the clause to force 51,000 striking teachers back to work, the first time this power to deny Charter rights had been used in Alberta. The move was widely condemned. Though Recall Nicolaides was already well underway by then, the organizers behind Operation Total Recall cited abuse of the notwithstanding clause as their catalyst: “When fundamental rights are set aside, it creates a precedent that affects us all.”

Tania didn’t ask me to sign the petition this time. Maybe she thought I already had. Or maybe she was feeling a surge of validation. Something was happening in Alberta.

Signatories in Calgary-Bow. Yeremiy: “Recall was the only tool I could see to hold my minister and my MLA accountable.”

And then the recall dam burst. November 10: Grande Prairie MLA Nolan Dyck. November 14: Calgary-Fish Creek MLA Myles McDougall. November 14: Morinville-St. Albert MLA Dale Nally. On it went. Jackie Lovely (Camrose). Jason Stephan (Red Deer-South). Searle Turton (Spruce Grove-Stony Plain). Social media was buzzing: Who wants a new MLA? Operation Total Recall was now calling for 44 UCP MLAs, nearly the entire caucus, to be removed.

By the end of the year some 26 recall campaigns had been approved by Elections Alberta. Premier Smith, as MLA for Brooks-Medicine Hat, was among the targets. Recall Nicolaides itself was now only weeks from its deadline—January 21—to collect enough signatures. Further recall applications dried up as either an MLA was deemed “impossible” to recall or citizens watched events in Calgary-Bow and beyond, playing wait and see.

Elections Alberta announced it needed additional staff to verify potentially hundreds of thousands of petitioner names and addresses and to confirm the eligibility of canvassers. This meant a substantial budget increase. A UCP-controlled legislative committee said no, which would have effectively killed recall in Alberta. Their refusal was ridiculed even by staunch conservative pundits, and the committee caved. Wrote Edmonton Journal columnist Lorne Gunter: “They [the UCP] made their bed and now they have to lie in it.”

Proponents were required to make their case in a statement not exceeding 100 words. Recall Nicolaides’s Jenny Yeremiy wrote that her MLA, as minister, showed “a clear failure to support public education,” citing privatization, more public funding for charter and private schools, overcrowded classrooms, insufficient staff and inappropriate curricula. MLA Mickey Amery, wrote his complainant, “supported policies that put vulnerable groups at risk and increased the cost of living.” Danielle Smith’s “disregard for local expertise and community voices” left her constituents “without accountable leadership.” Many statements cited the notwithstanding clause.

MLAs mounted a common defence: I do meet with voters, I do listen, our UCP got a mandate from Albertans. But Nicolaides, as the first up, set the tone. His recall, he argued, was illegitimate. The recall process should be reserved for “breaches of public trust, ethical violations or dereliction of duty,” not “dissatisfaction with government policy.” Using recall to “overturn an election,” he wrote, “undermines stable governance and the electoral process.”

The irony of UCP MLAs being targeted by a law they themselves had enacted only months earlier—unanimously, and over the objections of the opposition—wasn’t lost on anyone. Cosh, the pro-recall National Post pundit, likened Smith to Dr. Frankenstein gaping at his monstrous creation. “It is, frankly, just a bit silly for UCP politicians to now insist that recall was only to be used in cases of misconduct or incapacity,” he wrote. “If recall itself is legitimate, its semi-organized use to put collective pressure on governments must be legitimate.”

As recall spread, Kenney chimed in. He’d never intended his law to be used as a weapon, he told the CBC, but as an “ultimate tool of accountability” if a politician did “something absolutely egregious, illegal, grossly unethical.” Years earlier Kenney had given only two justifications to FIRE one’s MLA: If they’d “lost the public’s trust” or “broken promises.”

Elections Alberta’s “Recall FAQs” webpage, at “Valid reasons to recall,” says only: “There is no set criteria.”

Other jurisdictions erect guardrails. Florida, for example, limits recall to cases of “malfeasance, misfeasance, neglect of duty, drunkenness, incompetence, permanent inability to perform official duties, and conviction of a felony involving moral turpitude.” In Alberta simply being an MLA is enough.

The irony of UCP MLAs being targeted by a recall law they themselves had enacted only months earlier wasn’t lost on anyone.

Alberta’s recall law, as written, created other issues as well. Among the 26 MLAs subjected to recall was Calgary-Beddington’s Amanda Chapman, one of two NDP members caught up in the melee. The proponent, Laurie McCormack, offered as pretext that Chapman “chooses harsh partisan attacks likening Alberta’s elected government to extremists, and backs public sector unions over… families’ real priorities.” Similarly, NDP MLA Peggy Wright (Edmonton-Beverly-Clareview) deserved recall because she—per her complainant—“facilitates the exposure of children to sexualized material.” Wright was said to be “routinely inaccessible” to this constituent and “doesn’t return emails or calls.”

Then there’s the recall effort against Lethbridge-East’s Nathan Neudorf, which appeared to be bogus, organized perhaps by an ally of the UCP MLA himself. The stated case against Neudorf by “Ryan Tanner” was conspicuously lacking specifics: “Recent voting activity from him demonstrates a disconnect and his inability to meet the needs, desires and expectations of those he represents.” As reported by the CBC, would-be canvassers in Lethbridge emailed Tanner to help collect signatures. They never heard back. No petition locations were posted. No website was created. (Ultimately no signatures were sent to Elections Alberta.) But as long as a recall campaign against Neudorf was officially registered, no other one could be started.

Neudorf eventually declared, at the legislature, “I’m not actively involved in my own recall.” As a letter to the Lethbridge Herald pointed out, “This seems like a feeble equivocation. Were you passively involved, or were you aware it was going to happen before stepping back for plausible deniability?”

The law allowed for more abuses. MLA Dale Nally claimed that Joshua Eberhart, his recall campaign’s organizer, “does not vote in provincial elections,” so the effort was thus “without merit.” The campaign was allowed to go ahead, and Elections Alberta later determined Nally had violated election law.

Recall Gondek’s Landon Johnston told CTV News he suspected his petition was used by other conservative political actors for their own data-gathering. “I warned the privacy commissioner halfway through this project,” he said. “Anyone can co-opt this petition for their own gain.”

I was at home, sick, on a snowy mid-winter afternoon when the doorbell rang. On my porch were two older men, wearing parkas, toques and canvasser IDs and carrying shiny elections-grade Recall Nicolaides signs. They identified themselves as fellow Bownesians. “Have you heard about the campaign to recall our MLA?” the shorter man asked.

By now With nearly a third of Alberta’s MLAs being recalled… Oh—I’d heard.

I stepped outside to keep the dog inside. We chatted about Smith, her forcing teachers back to work, her flirting with separatism. The taller man said he’d voted UCP in 2023, and “that was a mistake.” He called Smith “Trumpy.” I said I sympathized with their anger.

But I told them I didn’t have much love for recall. I knew of its dubious record in the US. I didn’t like it when Kenney brought recall north. The anti-Gondek campaign struck me as baseless and sexist. Now opposition MLAs were being targeted out of spite. I was certainly amused by the UCP getting a taste of its own medicine. But I found myself agreeing with aspects of the Nicolaides defence. These were largely policy disagreements. The policies in question were perhaps stupid, or narrow-minded, or cruel. Ideally they’d be indefensible at election time. But none of these recalled MLAs stood accused of a conflict of interest or serious crime. And if one UCP MLA should be recalled for bad policy, so should they all.

The men said none of this mattered. Fact was, the UCP had brought in recall, and what was happening to them now was legal and just.

I couldn’t disagree. But I was sick, and in bare feet, and we could see our breath. The men asked if I’d sign the petition. I said recall didn’t exactly align with my idea of Alberta democracy. They said they respected my position. Then the shorter man, as he turned to walk away, gently pushed back one last time. “You know—they’re [the UCP] changing the rules of our democracy,” he said. “They’re taking away our rights. What else are we supposed to do?”

The Smith government has changed the rules. It not only used the notwithstanding clause to force teachers to work under contract terms that 90 per cent of them had voted to reject, it used the clause three more times that fall to override Albertans’ rights. It gave itself the power to decide whether a proposed referendum question violates the Constitution. It changed election laws, reinstating corporate and union donations to parties and political action committees (PACs) and suppressing the vote by restricting special ballots and requiring more ID. University of Alberta political scientist Jared Wesley wrote that these changes, alongside making recall easier, “mark another step in the Americanization of Alberta’s democratic institutions… and are the latest in a long list of democratic transgressions in this province.”

Campaign volunteers, fall 2025. Yeremiy calls recall a “gift” from the UCP: “It’s helping us build from the ground up.”

When I spoke on my doorstep with the gentlemen from Recall Nicolaides, they said the team had collected “maybe 6,000” signatures. Their aim was 16,006 signatures, or 40 per cent of the voter turnout in Calgary-Bow in 2023—and, really, they needed still more names to be on the safe side. Their three-month timeframe was fast closing. It didn’t look good for the campaign. And a more personal deadline was also looming. I had to decide if I’d add my name to the petition.

I decided to call Yeremiy. The woman who’d organized against Nicolaides—and inspired citizens from Medicine Hat to Grande Prairie to take up pens against their own MLAs—had told media she’d never planned to launch a recall, not even after Smith eased the rules. She’d tried to meet with Nicolaides to share her concerns. He dismissed her. When they finally spoke, at his office, he was aggressive and threatening. And so recall, she told the CBC, was “the only tool I could see that was capable of holding my minister and my MLA accountable.”

I asked her what she’d thought when Kenney brought in recall. “I remember wondering: What are they up to?” she said. “And then I remembered it being applied to Jyoti Gondek and thought, Oh, that’s what it’s about. I get the impression it was put in place in case the NDP got elected [in 2023], so they had a way to undermine the government.” She found that others troubled by Nicolaides’s record nonetheless had misgivings about recall. “[People] commented at the doors and at various signing locations about the recall action—not wanting to support it in any way.”

She said that “the way I could justify it” is that this UCP government doesn’t listen. “People who put forward thoughtful alternatives for this province are completely ignored.… And when [an MLA] does stand against anything within that party, they’re dismissed from their roles.”

Yeremiy believes this lack of accountability is getting worse. “I can use a specific example,” she said. “When the Eastern Slopes were opened up [to coal mining in 2020], it caused public outrage, and there was a response from the minister at the time. She reversed the action.” In fact, Kenney’s energy minister, Sonya Savage, had said that the 44-year-old policy protecting parts of the Rockies would be reinstated and that citizens would be consulted if her government ever again tried to make changes to it. “An important part of being a responsible government,” Savage had said, “is to admit when you’ve made a mistake and to fix it.”

But the Smith-era UCP is shameless, said Yeremiy. They’re unwilling even to slow down, let alone reverse. “We’ve seen that with coal. We’ve seen that with healthcare. We’ve seen that with education. We’ve seen that with the renewables moratorium. Literally everything this government has done, there’s no means for the public to put a stop to it.”

Yeremiy said the three-month-long petition effort had been “exhausting.” I wasn’t exactly surprised when she told me they were unlikely to get enough signatures to trigger a recall vote. But then she described the campaign in a surprising way. “They [the UCP] have given us a gift with this recall legislation,” she said. “It’s forcing us to speak with our neighbours. In the environmental and social justice movements, there’s a lot of camaraderie and solidarity. But at the end of the day we have to be able to talk to the people who live beside us.” She described a recent Eastern Slopes meeting in Canmore. “It was mostly local, and they offered great thoughts. But the challenge is we’re not bringing new people along. So what [recall] is doing, its gift, is it’s making us speak with people who normally aren’t interested in these important issues.”

I’d been thinking for weeks about recall as a provincial issue. But Yeremiy wasn’t focused on other recall efforts across the province. She was organizing dozens of her neighbours, many she’d never met before, to engage in local politics. They in turn were speaking with their neighbours, thousands of them, at the car wash, at roadsides, on doorsteps. About politics. About important issues. Class sizes. Charter rights. Representation. They were, as community organizers like to put it, “connecting with systems of power to enact change.”

This idea “came from my being a geophysicist and liability expert,” Yeremiy said. “We have to do land-based organizing. I go to meetings, talk about the land, have conversations. But the challenge, with people all over the province, is we’re not doing it in our own community. So recall is ultimately about governing ourselves. That’s what this gift is. It’s helping us understand how to build from the ground up.”

On a Sunday afternoon in late January I drove to the Foothills United Church in Bowness. My eldest daughter was with me. We’d been running errands; this was our last stop. The church, built in the 1940s and plastered in white stucco, had a Recall Nicolaides sign poking out of its dead grass. People were filing in through the main doors.

We saw Tania at the petition-signing table in the vestibule and said hello. She hadn’t seen my older daughter, her former student, in nearly eight years. Two other women, volunteers I hadn’t yet met, were at the booth. It was loud, but we chatted awhile. Their signature-collecting efforts would “absolutely fall short,” they said, their deadline now days away. Probably well short. But today was a celebration. A band was playing in the main church space. A Raging Granny passed by in an oversized floppy green hat. My daughter returned to the table with a cookie and a handful of pretzels.

I remained unconvinced about the idea of recall. If anything, Alberta’s recall insurgency strongly directs us to fix representative democracy. Rather than try to pick off MLAs between elections, one by one or 26 at a time, we need to curtail the vast power of party leaders, demand more free votes in the legislature, disallow corporate donations to parties, and protect the authority of independent watchdogs. And our elections must be proportional. First-past-the-post poisons the well, often elevating to positions of power “representatives” who are supported by a fraction of their electorate and ignore everyone else. Small wonder we end up in acrimony.

And yet I’d spent more time than ever over the past three months—outside of an election period—talking about politics with people in my community. I’d met neighbours. I’d discovered they had similar concerns to mine. Recall Nicolaides canvassers had done this and then some. A few told me the campaign had awakened them to the power of organizing. It had even given them hope. One volunteer, Rob, told me he’d had fun: “Just going out and collecting signatures has been such a positive experience.”

Yeremiy would be asked by a Calgary Herald reporter whether too few signatures would constitute failure. “Not even a little bit,” she said. “I feel so much more empowered than I did before this started. Most people involved in this petition have never been in politics before, (but) they felt compelled to do something, watching the misdirection of this government.”

Tania handed me a pen. I signed the petition. My daughter cheered. This list of names was an imperfect but unmistakable message to my MLA, my government and every citizen of Alberta. And if I couldn’t get behind recall itself, I would stand with my neighbours.

Evan Osenton is editor of Alberta Views. His “We Could Prevent a Mass Shooting” (Dec 2024) and “Who Wants Albertans to Gamble More?” can be found in AV’s online archives.

____________________________________________

Support independent local media. Please click to subscribe.

The post Operation Total Recall appeared first on Alberta Views.

I trekked down to the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) union hall in Edmonton’s Strathcona industrial park on a pitch-black November evening to check in on the state of the federal NDP leadership race. About two dozen union men were there to hear the local leadership candidate, Edmonton-Strathcona MP Heather McPherson, discuss her plan to resurrect Canada’s social democratic party from its worst-ever election defeat.

Of the five candidates pursuing the leadership, McPherson is the only sitting MP, making her the only contender able to introduce legislation. Her recently proposed private member’s bill to ban employer-dominated “company unions,” which earned McPherson a legal threat for specifically naming the Christian Labour Association of Canada, was a big hit at the union hall that night.

Whoever leads the federal NDP after the votes are counted on March 29 in Winnipeg will have a daunting task ahead of them, inheriting a rump party of seven seats and without official party status in the House of Commons. Whether the next leader is McPherson, Avi Lewis, Rob Ashton, Tanille Johnston or Tony McQuail, they will have to chart a path back to electoral relevance.

That path will have to start with the NDP’s traditional base, the working class, whose votes the Conservatives have made a concerted effort to attract under Pierre Poilievre. Writing in the Windsor Star, journalist Trevor Wilhelm noted that in the 2025 federal election, “multiple former orange NDP strongholds once propped up on union shoulders turned Tory blue,” including Windsor-West and London-Fanshawe in southwestern Ontario and Elmwood-Transcona in Winnipeg. The NDP will try to win back members of this socioeconomic group—people who engage in wage labour, working in manual or service-related jobs that lack the economic security and control over their working conditions enjoyed by salaried professionals, workers who can be but aren’t necessarily unionized.

In an interview at the IBEW hall, James Ball, president of Canadian Union of Postal Workers Local 730, recognized that the next NDP leader “has a bit of a struggle ahead of them.” With workers’ wages falling behind inflation, even as they secure gains through collective bargaining, Ball said, “a lot of workers are angry.” Poilievre’s Conservatives are winning them over by “really leaning into the rage bait,” with the leader’s tirades against immigrants, “woke ideology,” “vaccine vendettas” and “global elites preying on the fears and desperation of people to impose their power grab.” McPherson is well suited to winning these voters over, Ball said, because of her campaign’s emphasis on “meeting them where they are and understanding what they need.”

Heather McPherson on the the picket line with postal workers, Edmonton, September 2025

McPherson believes that a major NDP failure isn’t so much what it’s saying but how it says it. “The reason Poilievre was able to resonate with so many people is because he had a disciplined message. He was talking about issues that matter to Canadians,” she said in an interview a couple days before the IBEW event. The NDP, she added, needs to counter Poilievre’s language of anger and fear with a “simple, hopeful” message that at the same time promises policies that appeal to working people.

At her September campaign kickoff, McPherson said the party needs to “stop shrinking into purity tests and pushing people away.” One of her caucus colleagues, Winnipeg Centre MP Leah Gazan, said she was “appalled and deeply disappointed” by McPherson’s use of the phrase “purity test.” “That framing is frequently used to dismiss calls for justice from marginalized communities—especially Black, Indigenous, racialized, 2SLGBTQ+, disabled and immigrant workers—who now make up a major part of the labour movement and the working class,” Gazan wrote on Twitter.

I asked McPherson to clarify who in the NDP is administering purity tests and against whom. She responded in general terms, referring to a tendency in certain progressive circles in which “if you use the wrong words, somehow you get excluded,” which she said is anathema to building a larger movement.

She invoked, by contrast, Zohran Mamdani’s successful New York City mayoralty campaign in 2025, “which I think we’ve all been invigorated by.” McPherson said Mamdani spoke to people “about the things that mattered to them, and he spoke to them in a way that was simple, digestible and easy to access.” His campaign was laser-focused on issues of affordability, a priority from which the candidate wouldn’t waver.

Canada’s social democratic party is coming off its worst-ever election defeat. It lacks official party status in the House of Commons.

The NDP’s messaging, said McPherson, ought to focus on three closely interrelated issues—jobs, housing and the cost of living. “Until those issues are being addressed, we can’t reach Canadians,” she said.

The first leadership campaign policy McPherson unveiled was her housing platform, the centrepiece of which is to establish a federal Crown corporation to build housing in partnership with municipalities, organized labour and Indigenous governments, with a goal of building 1.2 million non-market housing units within a decade. Carney’s Build Canada Homes, by contrast, is focused on offering market-based incentives to private builders. McPherson’s policy also includes creating a National Renters’ Bill of Rights that would cap rent increases and prevent “unfair evictions,” banning real estate investment trusts from accessing public housing funds, and converting corporate-owned housing into co-op or non-profit units through a public buy-in program.

The second policy proposal the McPherson campaign produced was to put “power back in the hands of the people who make the NDP work” by engaging members in discussions around policy, candidate recruitment and training, giving constituency associations more resources and autonomy and hiring regional organizers to enhance coordination between them.

Avi Lewis with Ontario Public Service Employees Union Local 243 members at Niagara College, 2025.

Avi Lewis’s background is not one you might expect from someone leading a left-wing populist insurgency within the NDP. His grandfather, David Lewis, led the party from 1971 to 1975, and his father, Stephen Lewis, was the Ontario NDP leader from 1970 to 1977. Both worked to purge the party of the leftist Waffle movement in 1972.

The younger Lewis’s leadership platform is focused on offering a series of public options in major areas of the economy to challenge the concentration of corporate power, a radical proposal he says will substantially lower consumer costs. Echoing the Mamdani campaign, Lewis is proposing a series of publicly owned grocery stores across Canada, which The Globe and Mail dedicated a Thanksgiving Monday editorial to arguing against—a source of pride for Lewis. “It was significant to me that we had really landed on something that the elites in Canada don’t want to talk about,” said Lewis in an interview, “that they felt the need to respond to it after only three weeks of campaigning from one candidate in a party with only seven seats.”

Despite what the Globe editorial board says, Lewis believes this policy in particular has widespread support. “Working people are pissed off and exhausted by getting ripped off at the grocery store, and these populist-left economic policies for public options are popular across the political spectrum,” he said.

The Lewis platform also calls for a series of regional public telecom companies modelled after the success of SaskTel; postal banking, which is a reality in France, Germany, Italy and the UK; and a public non-profit pharmaceutical manufacturer, which Canada used to have with Connaught Labs before it was privatized by Brian Mulroney’s Conservative government. Like McPherson, Lewis wants to establish a national public housing builder, but his would build a million (rather than 1.2 million) non-market housing units within five years (rather than 10).

Lewis cautions that when politicians and media refer to working-class voters, they’re often referring to one segment of the working class, which he describes as “white skilled-trades guys in hard hats.” These are the workers with whom Poilievre has taken hundreds of photo ops as part of his concerted effort to attract them. “That’s a really important part of the working class,” said Lewis, “but they’re far from the whole story.”

A much larger cross-section of Canada’s working class toil in the service and care sectors. Many of these workers, which include everyone from Tim Hortons employees to long-term-care nursing aides, live in the suburbs, where Lewis acknowledges the NDP has “huge inroads to make,” and are first-generation immigrants. “Those are jobs dominated by women, with a huge proportion of racialized women, and they are underpaid and undervalued, and, in my view, some of the most essential workers in our economy,” said Lewis.

In addition to being “work that builds and maintains the connective tissue of society,” Lewis emphasizes that these sectors also have “very light footprints environmentally.”

On November 27, about a dozen Edmontonian supporters of Lewis gathered in the basement of the Whyte Avenue Boston Pizza to watch the NDP leadership debate on TV. One of them was Stephen Buhler, a former oil and gas worker from rural Alberta who used to manufacture mechanical seals for pipelines and now works as a machinist at the University of Alberta.

Buhler said he finds Lewis’s campaign refreshing because he advocates “bold” policies, such as a public grocery option, “that actually get people excited,” instead of engaging in endless compromises to appeal to “some person that, frankly, doesn’t exist.”

“When I was working in oil and gas, what I really wanted was an option that was not oil and gas. I wanted to help build future solutions that actually protect the planet and ensure we’re not stuck with the oil and gas roller coaster over and over again,” he said.

Rather than engaging in “process after process after process” and “working around the edges” to determine which specific set of focus-group-tested policies the public wants to see, Buhler believes the job of a political leader is to offer bold solutions that will materially improve people’s lives. “I’m seeing Heather McPherson talk about how she wants to consult people. She’s not really giving anything that we can really chew on,” he said. “It’s just kind of vibes.”

The key to winning back working-class support is to provide “solid and concrete” policies that support labour priorities.

Rob Ashton on the picket line with striking Ontario nurses in late 2025. Ashton, as a longshoreman, is something of a rarity in federal politics—a party leadership candidate who comes directly from the shop floor, the rank and file of workers.

No leadership aspirant has put workers front and centre more than Rob Ashton, a dock worker who has served as president of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union for more than a decade. He speaks explicitly of “class war” and the need for the NDP to be “unapologetically loud” in fighting it. “All we see happening is our lives getting worse, the working class,” he told The Tyee. “We’re all getting screwed, and we’re all getting lied to, election after election after election. I’ve had enough of it. This is a time where workers—Canadians—need a true voice in Ottawa.”

Ashton’s “Worker Power Plan” pledges to require that workers have seats on corporate boards (although he doesn’t specify how many), to repeal section 107 of the Canada Labour Code, which the federal Liberals have repeatedly used to order striking workers back to work, and to replace the temporary foreign workers program “with a fair program, built from the ground up to protect all workers, their status and their labour.”

His advocacy for dockworkers’ interests has, however, placed him in the awkward position of being open to a repeal of the federal tanker ban on BC’s northern coast, which position earned him praise from Alberta’s UCP government.

Tanille Johnston, the federal NDP’s first Indigenous woman leadership aspirant, touted her working-class upbringing at her October 9 campaign launch, noting that her father was a miner and her mother was a small-business owner. “They taught me what perseverance looked like—that if you work hard and care for your family, act with integrity, you could lead a good life,” she said. “But today so many Canadians are finding that that promise is a lie.”

Johnston, a social worker in addition to being a city councillor, has proposed implementing minimum nurse-to-patient ratios, which BC’s NDP government introduced in 2024 in collaboration with the BC Nurses’ Union, on a national scale. She also speaks of adopting national rent control, and fully incorporating pharmacare, dental care, vision care and mental health care into the public healthcare system. “We’re finished with half measures,” Johnston proclaimed at an October NDP leadership forum in Nanaimo.

Tony McQuail, an organic farmer from Huron County, Ontario, wants to collaborate with the Greens to ensure there’s only one candidate from either party running in each riding, and advocates “degrowth” economic policies in which the corporate pursuit of endless economic growth would be abandoned in favour of democratic decision-making about resource allocation.

McPherson says the NDP needs to be “unapologetically interested in winning”—not aiming to be “the conscience of Parliament.”

The NDP convention in Winnipeg falls roughly on the 10th anniversary of the 2016 federal party convention in Edmonton, where members voted to turf leader Tom Mulcair, who sharply departed from the NDP’s social democratic roots with an ill-fated pledge of balanced budgets. But it was also where Lewis set off a firestorm by proposing a policy resolution on the Leap Manifesto, a controversy with reverberations in today’s leadership race.

The 1,300-word blueprint for a green economy, including expansion of the low-carbon care economy, was written by Lewis, best-selling author Naomi Klein (his wife) and journalist Martin Lukacs, who now serves as a policy adviser to the Lewis leadership campaign, alongside a group of environmentalist, labour and Indigenous leaders.

The most contentious detail in the manifesto was its call for an end to “new infrastructure projects that lock us into increased extraction decades into the future,” a thinly veiled reference to pipelines, which Alberta’s NDP government was pursuing vigorously at the time the manifesto reached the floor of the federal NDP convention.

Then-premier Rachel Notley called the document “naive,” “ill-considered” and “very tone-deaf.” Environment minister Shannon Phillips, whom Lewis had endorsed during the 2012 provincial election, gave a closed-door speech to the federal caucus, disparaging those who suggest “we should shut down, in the short or even medium term, the industry that powers this province and this country.” This sentiment was echoed by Wildrose leader Brian Jean, who called the Leap Manifesto a “radical anti-Alberta resolution,” and Alberta PC leader Ric McIver, who suggested it reflected “radical socialist ideology.”

For McPherson, who wasn’t yet an MP at the time but was an active party member, the Leap was a “ridiculous political policy” and “vanity project.” “My opposition to it certainly wasn’t opposition to the messages within it,” she said in our interview. “It was opposition to how it was brought forward and how it undermined the work of our membership.”

But elements of the party membership were on board for the manifesto. In the months between the Leap’s release during the 2015 federal election campaign and the NDP’s 2016 convention, the Canadian Press reported that more than 20 NDP riding associations had endorsed it.

Lewis worked on the Leap resolution with former MPs Meghan Leslie, Craig Scott and Libby Davies, as well his aunt, former Ontario NDP president Janet Solberg. The former MPs kept Mulcair in the loop about the resolution every step of the way, who relayed it to the Alberta NDP leadership, said Lewis.

Because the resolution was so low on the list of resolutions for the Edmonton convention, Lewis had to make his case before a prioritization panel about why it should be debated at all. “The Alberta NDP didn’t send anyone to speak against that,” he recalled, “because they already knew that the resolution was coming, and they’d already agreed that it should have a chance to be voted on by the delegates.”

The motion ultimately adopted by the party membership by a wide margin called for elements of the manifesto to “be debated and modified on their own merits and according to the needs of various communities and all parts of Canada.”

NDP leadership contenders (left to right) Rob Ashton, Tanille Johnston, Avi Lewis, Heather McPherson and Tony McQuail

Jen Hassum, the executive director of the Broadbent Institute, a think tank named after late federal NDP leader Ed Broadbent and which advocates for social democracy, argues there’s been a “class detanglement” in recent decades, in which parties that have historically appealed to blue-collar voters, such as the NDP in Canada, the Democrats in the US and Labour in the UK, increasingly draw their support from a higher-income, university-educated professional class.

Hassum attributes this phenomenon to the rise of neoliberalism, with its promise to workers that “deregulating and selling off government assets is going to lead to greater competition, cheaper costs and therefore perhaps a better standard of living.”

But “that didn’t materialize at all,” she told me. “In fact, what happened is the rise of private equity squeezed people for their time, their energy and their money, to the point where working-class people have very limited time and resources, and even very little trust, to be able to participate in politics.”

In New York City, Mamdani was able to partially reverse this trend, with exit polls showing him winning among voters who made between $30,000 and $200,000 a year, tied with former governor Andrew Cuomo among those who make between $200,000 and $300,000, and losing among both those who make less than $30,000 and those who make over $300,000.

The reason he did so wasn’t only due to his affordability-oriented policies or effective communication. “Good policy in a vacuum is just good policy,” said Hassum. What made the difference was his ground game. Mamdani’s network of thousands of canvassers, many of whom cut their teeth with the local Democratic Socialists of America chapter, literally met people where they were at to pitch their candidate to the masses while traditional media dismissed him as a far-left extremist.

The relationship between policy, communication and organizing is “symbiotic,” said Hassum. “The secret to organizing is that that’s actually how a campaign ought to learn about the policies that move people, and even the words to use to tell the story and to tell the bigger narrative.”

There’s a lesson here for the NDP as it rebuilds. “Something that I really hope to see from the NDP is a resurgence in having volunteers—regular, typical, ordinary people—do the work of reaching out within their communities and do that base organizing,” Hassum said. The NDP has the priorities and interests of most Canadians at heart, she argued. “Any seat in this country can be flipped, because our interests are aligned.”

Speaking on stage at the IBEW union hall last November with Local 424 assistant business manager Scott Crichton, McPherson said the NDP’s failure to resonate with working-class voters was especially tragic because “we’d somehow lost touch with people that we were supposed to be representing,” leading to a two-party duopoly outside of Quebec led by people who are entirely uninterested in labour issues. “Mark Carney does not give a damn about working-class Canadians, and Pierre Poilievre—he doesn’t even know what they are,” said McPherson. “This guy has literally never done anything except work in the House of Commons, basically just getting into fights.”

Crichton told me that the “key” to winning back the working class is to provide “solid and concrete” policies that support labour priorities, and to clearly state these in the party platform, as opposed to offering “rhetoric and jargon.”

For McPherson, the NDP needs to be a party that is “unapologetically interested in winning.” “I have no time for folks who think we should be the conscience of Parliament,” she added. “That’s not what I want to do. I want to elect more New Democrats, and I want us to be able to win.” She looks to the provincial NDP governments of Wab Kinew in Manitoba and David Eby in BC as models to emulate. “We’ve seen how when provincial parties across the country are able to win, they can fix things for Canadians and make life better for Canadians,” said McPherson, who’s been endorsed by former Alberta premier Notley and environment minister Phillips.

But before the federal NDP can win, McPherson said, there’s a need to “rebuild our party in a way that respects the membership.” In recent years, she said, the party “has treated our members, frankly, like some problem to be solved, not like the base of our movement.” This means working with local riding associations—and not only in ridings deemed winnable, but across the country, because those are the people who can provide insight into how to win on the ground.

McPherson credits the Edmonton Strathcona NDP riding association with flipping the long-time conservative seat to the NDP for the first time in 2008. In 2025, McPherson’s 47 per cent support was the highest share of the vote that any NDP candidate won. “We did the work, we knocked on the doors, and we talked to folks about the things that mattered to them,” she said. “And now it’s the strongest seat for the NDP in this country.”

Jeremy Appel is an Edmonton-based journalist interested in politics, the media and corporate power. He’s the author of Kenneyism: Jason Kenney’s Pursuit of Power (Dundurn, 2024).

____________________________________________

Support independent local media. Please click to subscribe.

The post Winning Back Workers appeared first on Alberta Views.

I was here on the lookout not for the last vestiges of a summer harvest, but for a guy wrapped in the Canada flag—literally, according to vendors. He was here just minutes ago, they told me. He was one of an army of volunteers across Alberta carrying clipboards and inviting people to sign a petition asking the question “Do you agree that Alberta should remain in Canada?”

A simple enough question, you’d think. But in Alberta these days nothing is simple.

My flag-wearing volunteer was here, no doubt about it. He left behind evidence in the form of vendors who not only supported his petition but were happy to explain why. “I signed it,” said Julie Morrison, who runs the “Weird Neighbour” kiosk, selling pins, fridge magnets and custom mugs. She told me she believes in having a strong federal government. And she’d welcome the petition question becoming a referendum question in Alberta. “I like how it blocks them [the separatists] from ever doing this again,” she said. “We don’t need any more strife in our province. We don’t want to see every year there’s a new group, a new radical group that wants to separate, right?”

The petition was at the heart of the “Forever Canadian” initiative. The campaign was created by Thomas Lukaszuk, a former Progressive Conservative MLA and cabinet minister who rose to become deputy premier. Now Lukaszuk is architect of this anti-separatist initiative, which aims to counter a pro-separatist movement being egged on by premier Danielle Smith.

____________________________________________

Want more articles like this?
Subscribe with code FOREVER and receive 10 issues for $30.

____________________________________________

In a September Globe and Mail op-ed, Lukaszuk spelled out his motivation. Most Albertans, he wrote, love being Canadian. When anger at the federation does flare up, “the stronger will of Albertans and their pride in Canada douses the flames of separation, and we’re able to get back to the business of building a strong future for Alberta within Canada.” But recent more strident talk of separation is doing harm, he added. “[It] damages Alberta’s reputation, creates uncertainty, drives away talent and investment and divides communities.”

In an interview during the height of his campaign, Lukaszuk bristled at the suggestion the Forever Canadian initiative is partisan or the beginning of a political movement. “No one could ever say this is an NDP thing or a Liberal thing or a Conservative thing, because they’re all, in virtually equal numbers, engaged in this campaign and supporting it,” he said. “The overarching motivation is just pure love of this country.”

Lukaszuk said the campaign was keeping him “extremely, extremely busy” and that he was pleasantly overwhelmed by the response. He pointed to 5,000 volunteers who organized hundreds of petition-signing venues across the province, whether permanent ones inside local businesses or pop-up tables outside sports events, concerts, book fairs or anywhere else Albertans congregate for a few hours, such as the Smoky Lake Pumpkin Fair and the Andrew Garlic Festival. Lukaszuk also took a multi-week turn driving the group’s maple-leaf-adorned “Unity Bus” across Alberta to collect signatures. He said his daughter spotted a car sporting a “Forever Canadian” bumper sticker. Other volunteers noticed lawn signs. Amazing, he said—because his group didn’t produce any merchandise.

When it came to signing the petition, you had to be at least 18 years old, a Canadian citizen and a resident of Alberta with a physical address. And you had to sign in person.

Lukaszuk told his volunteers they weren’t conducting a sales pitch. They weren’t to entice people to sign, or engage in arguments, or even make the case for Albertans to reject separation. They were simply to invite people to sign. If someone said no, leave it at that.

Lukaszuk told me people had been signing up in droves. Forever Canadian’s official goal was to get at least 300,000 names, verified by the rules set by Elections Alberta, to move the question “Do you agree that Alberta should remain in Canada?” to the legislature for approval as an official referendum question in 2026. Privately, however, Lukaszuk told me he wanted to get many, many more signatures than that, because clearing the official bar so easily would itself send a message to the Smith government and all Albertans.

When I ask people why they’re signing, pretty much everyone gives me a quizzical look. The answer is so obvious. “Because I’m a Canadian citizen.”

When I asked people at various pop-up events why they were signing, pretty much everyone gave me a quizzical look, as if I’d asked a stupid question. The answer was so obvious. “Because I’m a Canadian citizen,” said Janet Johnstone, as she stopped by the booth at a dog park in south Edmonton. “I was born in Edmonton. I’ve lived here all my life. I love Alberta. But I’m Canadian.”

For Albert Kwong, who immigrated from China in 1978 and has lived in Alberta ever since (save five years in Ontario and 18 months in Vancouver), a united Canada makes sense economically and practically. “In a big Canada we support each other,” he said. “I think that’s the best way to do it, right?” And we can visit each other, too. “I just came back from the east coast,” he told me. “I can go to Toronto, go to the west, to Quebec. I don’t worry about applying for a visa. When I go to China, I need a visa.”

Lukaszuk said he heard hundreds of emotional stories, including from a woman in her 90s from Vegreville who asked a campaign volunteer to come to her home so she could sign the petition to honour her late husband who fought for Canada in the Second World War. Or the family that drove from Fort McMurray to Edmonton to sign the petition rather than wait for a pop-up event in town. (The campaign eventually got to Fort McMurray anyway, in late summer, with a petition signing in front of Mitchell’s Café.)

Lukaszuk said some Albertans signed with a mixture of love and a bit of anger: “A lot of them, refugees and immigrants as well, are mad. They’re angry. They say, ‘You know, people here just don’t realize how good they have it. What a great country this is.’ They just think it’s pathetic that we got ourselves into a situation where we actually have to declare our love for Canada, because it should be so obvious.”

Putting aside the monumental legal, economic and cultural barriers to separation, including outspoken opposition from First Nations, most Albertans are for staying in Canada. A Leger survey in May 2025 showed that 67 per cent of Albertans oppose separation. A CBC-commissioned poll, also in May, indicated that even though support for separation had grown from 12 per cent in 2020 to 17 per cent in 2025, 67 per cent of respondents disagree that Alberta would be better off if we separate from Canada.

But it wasn’t just everyday Albertans signing the petition. Lukaszuk’s initiative resurrected a number of other “old” Progressive Conservatives, once powerful and well-known local politicians who had disappeared into the annals of time, along with their party, but were now popping up like prairie dogs at sunrise.

Former premier Ed Stelmach, now retired and living on a homestead founded by his grandparents in northeastern Alberta in 1898, jumped back into the public arena with a social media post urging Albertans to sign Lukaszuk’s petition. “I support a strong Alberta within a strong Canada,” he wrote. In August Stelmach went on Ryan Jespersen’s Real Talk podcast. “I’m worried that if we rush into something like separation, do we end up with Brexit?” he asked, referring to the disastrous British vote to leave the European Union.

Two former conservative Alberta MPs, Ian McClelland and Brent Rathgeber, also endorsed Lukaszuk’s initiative, with Rathgeber going one step further to help manage the campaign.

They were joined by Richard Starke, a former PC MLA from Lloydminster, who, following the UCP–Wildrose merger in 2017, sat as the lone Progressive Conservative in the assembly. “I’m no separatist, I can tell you that right now,” Starke told me. “Separation from Canada would be an absolute unmitigated disaster for Lloydminster. We’d have a national border going down the middle of our city. It would be a train wreck.” He argued that by giving a sympathetic ear to a separatist sentiment, premier Smith is simply trying to score points with her base. “If an Alberta politician wants to gain some traction, we bad-mouth Ottawa, right That’s especially true when there’s a Liberal government in power.”

Danielle Smith’s critics from NDP and liberal points on the political spectrum also expressed support for Forever Canadian. Lukaszuk insists his initiative has nothing to do with partisan politics. But it’s impossible to entirely disentangle the issue of separation from politics. Premier Smith has introduced a series of policy changes to achieve her goal of creating a “sovereign Alberta” within a united Canada, a statement her critics call oxymoronic. Her tactic is a significant and, for many Albertans, troubling break from Alberta’s political past, where for decades premiers chronically railed against Liberal federal governments but stopped well short of encouraging separatists.

As premier 20 years ago, Ralph Klein suggested that on any given day 15 per cent of Albertans supported separation, a number he said he could manage. But in 2003 Klein had to deal with loud separatists at a PC annual general meeting. He ended up promising to push Ottawa for more provincial powers. But Klein clearly rejected splitting from Canada. “I cannot honestly see myself saying, ‘Here is a separation question, and dammit, unless you listen to us and unless we get our own way, unless you do this, unless you do that, we’re going to separate,’” Klein told reporters. “I don’t first of all see myself doing that, and I don’t know how the feds would buy it.”

A lot of petition signers are mad. They say, “You know, people here just don’t realize how good they have it. What a great country this is.”

Twenty-some years later, premier Smith is hoping the federal government will buy it, or at least take separatist sentiment seriously enough to give in to her government’s demands for more pipelines to help Alberta companies get more oil and gas to markets. To do that she’s trying to create a base beyond diehard separatists.

A September 25, 2025, Substack by U of A Ph.D. student and researcher Sam Goertz—“Is Separatism Mainstream in Alberta?”—looked at the complexity of Albertans’ feelings about Confederation. His work was based on extensive interviews done by the Common Ground initiative, which aims to find ways for progressives and conservatives to talk to each other, because “[c]itizens appear to have lost the shared sense of purpose and values necessary to debate matters of the public good respectfully, without alienating or disparaging their neighbours.” The project constructed an imaginary “typical” Albertan called Joe, who is not a separatist but is separatism-curious. “He wants Alberta to remain in Canada and make it work, but life has been getting harder lately, and maybe things would be better if Alberta went it alone,” Goertz wrote. “Or at least, Alberta needs to do something more drastic to get a better deal with Ottawa. [Joe] feels that Alberta has little power and that Albertans are neither well respected nor understood by the rest of the country.”

In late September I met a version of Joe at a pop-up event at an Edmonton dog park. He was biking home from work and stopped to chat with a couple of the Forever Canadian volunteers he recognized as neighbours. But he wasn’t prepared to sign the petition.

“I’m in the oil and gas sector,” he told me. “And I want to be a part of Canada. But I do see why people have frustrations, right?” He said he thinks his wife signed the petition a few weeks before. “I’m not against signing,” he added. “But I have some concerns, and I don’t know if people’s voices are being heard.”

When I asked for his name, he hesitated and said to simply call him “Brad,” because politics has become too divisive and he didn’t want to be a target. “People are very confrontational right now, and if there’s a reason to be frustrated with you for not being 100 per cent one way or the other, because you have some unanswered questions, I think people, unfortunately, want to spit venom.”

Some pro-Canada anti-separatists—even as they were eager to sign the petition—told me they were wary of Lukaszuk’s motivation. His criticisms of the premier go way back, to when he was a PC minister and she was leader of the Wildrose.

Lukaszuk has heard these and similar concerns: “Some politicians are reticent to get involved, because there’s a fear I may turn this into a political party and maybe unseat them or take over their leadership,” he said. “But that’s irrational for two reasons. One, because that’s not what I’m doing. That’s not what my plan is, period.”

The other reason, he said, is that the politicians, past and present, supporting his stay-in-Canada effort represent a wide range of views that would have trouble coming together. Political strategist Stephen Carter, who worked on Naheed Nenshi’s campaign for mayor of Calgary, agreed. “People can mark their ballot against separation in a referendum and then still choose Danielle Smith [in a general election],” he told me.

Lukaszuk said his ultimate goal is to not have a referendum at all. “I’m the last one who wants a referendum on Alberta separating or staying in Canada,” he said. “We don’t need to have a referendum.” Rather, he wants the legislature to adopt a formal policy rejecting separation. But he said it can’t end there. “Those who are either hesitant to sign or who are actually outright pro-separation… I may disagree with them, but they definitely feel that way, and we need to address that.”

One benefit of the Forever Canadian campaign, he said, is that it has helped to bring Albertans’ grievances into clearer focus. “Certain demographics are starting to reveal the epicentre of this anger,” said Lukaszuk. “There’s work to be done. When this campaign is all completed, we’re not going to say, ‘Oh, don’t worry, separatism isn’t real, it’s not a threat.’ Because if we don’t start addressing some of these issues, fixing them and educating people on how things really work in Canada, this separatist movement will grow.”

The petition was the largest in Canada’s history, he said, adding the Forever Canadian movement has only just begun.

On October 28, 2025, Lukaszuk announced the campaign had “smashed” its goal. Standing in front of stacks of 61 boxes of petitions containing 456,388 signatures, he told reporters Albertans had sent a clear message: “Alberta is and always will be Forever Canadian.” The petition was the largest in our country’s history, he said. But he added that the Forever Canadian movement has only just begun.

Elections Alberta said it would verify the signatures and announce its results no later than January 6, 2026.

At farmers markets and dog parks and garlic festivals and beyond, across the entire province, the Albertans who signed Lukaszuk’s pro-Canada petition did so for reasons both unique to their own lives but also common to the group. One university student in downtown Edmonton told me he wants to keep together a country that so many of his forebears built: “Canada is a group of people made up of many other groups of people,” he said. “It’s not what we stand for as Canadians to be separating out into smaller chunks. We’re a country of immigrants and we’re a country of people who came together. Why would we want to disassemble something that we worked so hard to put together?”

Graham Thomson has covered Alberta politics for decades and writes a bi-monthly column for Alberta Views.

____________________________________________

Want more articles like this?
Subscribe with code FOREVER and receive 10 issues for $30.

The post Forever Canadian appeared first on Alberta Views.

First off, premier Smith could call an election anytime she wants—today, tomorrow, next spring. She needn’t follow the election-every-four-years convention. Under our system of government all she would need to do is ask Alberta’s lieutenant governor to dissolve the legislature and direct the chief electoral officer to issue the writs of election.

Wait, you ask—what about our fixed-election-date law?

Alberta’s fixed-election-date law is an illusion, a piece of political theatre designed to evoke American-style politics. It disappears like a puff of smoke when confronted by the “reserve powers” of the province’s lieutenant governor. Here’s what Alberta’s Election Act says about a fixed election date: “Nothing in this section affects the powers of the Lieutenant Governor, including the power to dissolve the Legislature.”

The fixed-election-date law is an illusion, a piece of theatre designed to evoke American-style politics.

Think back to the 2015 provincial election. At the time, Alberta had a fixed election “period” where an election, by provincial law, was to be held sometime between March 1 and May 31, 2016. But premier Jim Prentice wanted to go one year early (arguably to avoid campaigning during a looming recession), so he simply asked the lieutenant governor to dissolve the legislature.

So, why would Danielle Smith call an early election?

Answering that question means moving from the world of misleading “fixed” election date laws to the more familiar world of cutthroat politics.

Thomas Lukaszuk, the former Progressive Conservative deputy premier who spent the fall championing the “Forever Canadian” initiative (trying to force a referendum that would ask Albertans “Do you agree that Alberta should remain in Canada?”) told me he thinks Smith will go early because the NDP is dropping in public opinion polls: “If they (the UCP) are smart,” he says, “they’ll call a very early election and win a large majority.”

Peter Guthrie voluntarily quit his cabinet portfolio in February, was kicked out of the UCP caucus in April for criticizing Smith, and is now trying to cobble together a party to challenge the UCP. He thinks Smith will call an election early next year to get ahead of problems including a ballooning budget deficit and a troubled healthcare system. He expects Smith to introduce a “good news” budget in February and “call an election in March right afterwards.”

But nobody has explained how Smith would justify going early to the public. That’s a crucial consideration. Voters tend to view early elections as a manipulative move by a desperate government trying to avoid trouble on the horizon.

Besides Jim Prentice’s snap election in 2015, Don Getty called a one-year-early election in 1989 and Ralph Klein called one five months early in 2004. None of them gave a good argument for going early. Even though Getty’s government won the election, the premier lost his own seat in Edmonton. He could only return to the legislature after winning a rural by-election. Klein’s government likewise won the election but lost 11 seats, and its popular vote dropped by 15 percentage points compared to the 2001 election.

I’m not saying that calling an early election is the sole reason all these premiers lost ground, or a seat, or their entire government. But I would argue going early was an indication they were under pressure and wanted to strike while the iron was hot, or at least still warm.

Going early, though, sometimes pays off. Ontario premier Doug Ford, deemed by one poll to be the most unpopular premier in Canada in December of 2024, called a snap election in February 2025, almost a year and a half ahead of his province’s own “fixed” election date of June 2, 2026. He won his third consecutive majority government.

Ford shrewdly made Donald Trump the ballot-box issue: “We need a mandate from the people to fight against Donald Trump’s tariffs, the attack he’s [bringing] against our families, our businesses, our communities.”

Alberta NDP leader Naheed Nenshi suspects premier Smith just might similarly call a snap election in early 2026: “I’m not sure the premier herself knows, or her office knows. I think they’re changing their mind day-to-day, based on what they see in the wind. So we’re ready.”

As I write this, Smith continues to hold a strong grip on power, and her polling numbers are steady. I think Smith will stick to the “fixed” election date of October 18, 2027. But then again, there’s not much stickiness to a date that can so easily be unfixed.

Graham Thomson is a political analyst, member of the Legislature Press Gallery and former Edmonton Journal political columnist.

____________________________________________

Support independent local media. Please click to subscribe.

The post The Next Alberta Election appeared first on Alberta Views.

The question popped up last January when members of the United Conservative Party caucus used their voting power on a legislative committee to give all MLAs a 2.4 per cent pay hike—raising their annual base salary to $123,838, an increase of $2,902. The minority of NDP members on the committee all voted against the raise, saying it was tone deaf at a time when many Albertans were struggling with the cost of living.

The UCP members argued the raise was hardly an exercise in gouging taxpayers. MLAs hadn’t had a pay increase in more than a decade. In fact, because of two pay cuts, in 2015 and 2019, MLAs were actually making less money in early 2025 than they were in 2014, when the base salary was $134,000.

But even this small, once-in-a-decade hike created a PR headache for the UCP, not just because the NDP voted against it but because over the years conservative politicians in Alberta have made this into a political minefield for themselves.

Before 1993, Alberta politicians were not only well paid but enjoyed a “gold-plated” pension plan 40 per cent higher than the average Canadian politician. Realizing this could hurt the government in that spring’s election, premier Ralph Klein scrapped the plan altogether.

Klein’s move was politically popular but also a cynical overreaction that indirectly led to MLAs later finding surreptitious ways of compensating themselves, such as paying elected members to sit on various committees. That in turn created a crisis for then-premier Alison Redford during the 2012 election campaign, when the public discovered some MLAs had been paid $1,000 a month for sitting on a committee that hadn’t met since 2008. Redford apologized and ordered her MLAs to pay back “every penny” they had received.

Sandwiched in between these two crises was then-premier Ed Stelmach’s faceplant when, after winning the 2008 election, he and his cabinet colleagues voted behind closed doors to give themselves a whopping pay hike: 34 per cent for Stelmach and 30 per cent for the ministers. After a public outcry, and with the province hitting a recession, Stelmach announced in 2009 he’d be taking a 15 per cent wage cut. But it turned out he only cut his “premier’s allowance,” the extra money he was paid as premier. The cut to his total salary was closer to 5 per cent.

Public suspicions of government pay took another hit when Jim Prentice’s Progressive Conservative government in 2015 and Jason Kenney’s UCP government in 2019 announced 5 per cent pay cuts not as an altruistic move but as a manipulative negotiating tactic against civil servants in contract talks. Kenney went further, undermining the value of MLAs themselves. During the 2019 campaign he said, “Alberta’s UCP will give voters the power to fire their MLAs if they break promises.” In the party’s Twitter feed, “FIRE” was in all caps.

This plays into the cynical narrative that politicians cannot be trusted. And it’s not a far step removed from the argument that politicians don’t deserve a decent salary.

But don’t they?

BC’s opposition leader says politicians must be fairly compensated: “You pay peanuts, you get monkeys.”

The irony for politicians is that when they put the question to third-party experts, hoping to kill the issue, the experts say something like: “The premier’s compensation is inadequate and not commensurate with the duties, obligations and responsibilities of the office.” This was the finding of retired Supreme Court justice John Major, who in 2012 wrote a government-commissioned report into MLA pay and perks. He recommended that then-premier Alison Redford receive a $100,000 pay increase, taking her annual salary to $335,000, the same as a senior chief justice.

A mortified Redford rejected the recommendation.

But shouldn’t an Alberta premier at least be paid as much as, say, a deputy minister, a member of the civil service who today makes $312,884 Instead, Danielle Smith receives the base pay of $123,838 plus a premier’s allowance of $66,810, bringing her total “base” pay to $190,648. Add in some retirement benefits and it’s closer to $210,000.

By comparison, after a 16-year wage freeze, Ontario bumped up its politicians’ salaries by 35 per cent this year, with the premier now making $282,000. British Columbia’s premier makes $227,000.

In April, BC opposition leader John Rustad said politicians “who give up their prime earning years” need to be fairly compensated. He added: “You pay peanuts, you get monkeys.”

It’s a cynically framed comment that goes to the nub of the question over MLA pay and perks. It’s a particularly thorny issue in Alberta, where the actions of politicians themselves have made it an almost impossible question to answer.

Graham Thomson is a political analyst, member of the Legislature Press Gallery and former Edmonton Journal political columnist.

____________________________________________

Support independent local media. Please click to subscribe.

The post The Politics of Salaries appeared first on Alberta Views.

Laurence Decore

The mayors of today seem to have little idea how powerful they can be when they’re fighting for what is right for their citizens… when they are both courageous and, importantly, creative in marshalling the support of their citizens against an oppressive “superior” power. Alberta’s big-city mayors,after all, are elected by citizens who live and vote in as many as 46 provincial constituencies and 20 federal ridings. Premiers and prime ministers are all too aware of the potential electoral danger posed by a mayor who can rile up so many people over issues that closely touch their lives.

Unfortunately, courage and creativity in fighting ill-willed governments are not in great evidence these days. Too many people in all walks of life are bowing to political (and economic) power that has become so pervasive in our province that almost no one believes it can be fought. Too many politicians seek office for power, rather than to serve. They know how to be elected, but not why.

Much can be achieved by a mayor who brings courage, creativity and a sincere focus on public service to the office. Laurence Decore, Edmonton’s mayor from 1983 to 1988, exemplified those values more than any Alberta politician since Peter Lougheed.

Decore’s father, John Sr., a chief judge of the federal district court and a former Vegreville Member of Parliament, instilled in his son a strong social responsibility to work to improve the lives of everyday people regardless of their sex, ethnicity or socio-economic status. Laurence was taught that the purpose of politics is service, not power.

On the day of his swearing-in ceremony—held for previous mayors behind closed doors in the presence of family and “upscale” political supporters and donors—Laurence Decore at the last minute ordered that chairs, tables, linen, cutlery, tea and munchies be set out on the plaza in front of City Hall, and that buses be sent to senior citizens homes to bring people to a “swearing-in tea party.”

One of Decore’s first moves was to fire the previous mayor’s chauffeur and order the “limo” be sold. He drove his own modest Ford throughout his years in office.

Once, during a heated public debate over the publicly owned Edmonton Telephones’ request for a $1 monthly increase to residential phone bills, one of Decore’s advisers sent him a note asking why he was making such a big deal out of a small increase. The mayor replied it would take a dollar from the already meagre food budgets of the poor. He convinced the phone company to apply more often for much smaller increases.

Alberta Report mid-1990s. In 1993 Laurence Decore’s Alberta Liberal Party got within a few thousand votes (in the tightest 10 constituencies) of forming government.

Early in Decore’s tenure the city administration was topped by a powerful Commission Board of senior unelected bureaucrats. While the mayor was a token elected member, the chief commissioner chaired its meetings. The mayor was in effect subservient to change-resistant bureaucrats and their boss.

On day one of his mayoralty, Decore ordered that the locks be changed on the private stairway between the chief commissioner’s office and the mayor’s office. He chuckled at the shouted fury of the chief commissioner when the man discovered he would henceforth have to use a public stairway and glass-walled waiting room until the mayor admitted him.

He also evicted the once-powerful members of the Commission Board from their parking stalls under City Hall, giving these to elected council members. He ended the practice of firefighters ferrying the commissioners’ cars offsite to be washed. Council members were made top priority for invitations to public events; commissioners, who’d been first before, now came last.

Within a few months, Decore convinced council to disband the Commission Board, replacing it with an executive committee of elected councillors and, to his great dismay at now being the lone bureaucrat, the chief commissioner. Councillors were rotated yearly to ensure each council member an equal chance at Executive Committee participation during their three-year term.

With elected people back in control at city hall, the appropriate balance of power was finally restored.

Decore saw to it that the Citizen Action Centre—which answered citizen questions and helped people who had issues with the bureaucracy—was given authority to act on the mayor’s behalf in resolving a host of issues previously subject to time-consuming involvement by the mayor and councillors and any number of bureaucrats. Citizens were amazed at the refreshing speed with which their needs were now looked after.

Each Friday noon, Decore hosted a high school student council and their police resource officer for a pizza lunch in the mayor’s office lounge. He didn’t have a political agenda to impart; he simply listened.

Also, each week he and top representatives from the Citizen Action Centre and Edmonton Transit System visited a different seniors home to bring residents news of current happenings at City Hall, to answer their questions and hear their complaints and suggestions.

When he had time for a lunch on his own, he often would go to cafeterias or modest restaurants and sit in the middle of the room. Before he’d finished his meal, people of all ages would have approached him with everything from a handshake to a complaint about potholes.

As part of the city’s debt reduction strategy, many councillors wanted to privatize services such as waste removal and building cleaning. Decore passionately argued that city employees had higher standards because profit wasn’t their underlying motive. He convinced council to adopt a 50:50 split between the public and private sectors to keep the latter in check vis à vis standards and costs.

He maintained a healthy respect for unions. He may not have always agreed with their demands, but no union leader left Decore’s office thinking they didn’t get a fair hearing. When the City’s budget needed assertive trimming, he knew city employees would need facts if they were going to believe the city wasn’t just artificially setting the stage for wage cuts. He implemented a “cascade system” wherein each layer of management was thoroughly briefed about budget details, then assigned to impart those details to the next level down in the hierarchy. In turn, those people did the same with the next level, until finally every employee knew the facts.

Using this system the City won an international Government Finance Officers Association award for the humanity with which it had accomplished downsizing with a minimum of grief to employees.

Laurence Decore with a mobile phone in 1986, when mobile cellular telephone service became available in Edmonton.

When so-called “senior” governments did things that harmed Edmontonians by depriving the city of revenue or by withdrawing critical services that supported people, Decore was fearless in taking on those governments and in marshalling the active support of the city’s citizens in his battles.

In his time, his city’s ownership of Edmonton Telephones was unique in North America. But EdTel was prevented by premier Peter Lougheed’s provincial government from receiving a fair share of the revenue generated by long-distance phone calls made by the company’s own customers. Decore asked Lougheed to “make it right” many times but was constantly rebuffed. He decided finally to place public pressure on Lougheed, with a strategy that humbled the province and its publicly owned Alberta Government Telephones (AGT).

In complete secrecy, a dozen telecom consultants were brought to the city and housed in a downtown hotel. For several weeks they developed a technical strategy whereby EdTel denied AGT the information it required to know what telephone number was originating a long-distance call. This rendered AGT unable to bill EdTel customers for long-distance calls. As a temporary fix, AGT operators throughout Alberta were forced to intercept outgoing EdTel calls and ask what number the caller was calling from. This worked for awhile, until a councillor working on the strategy slipped it to the media that there was no reason callers had to give AGT the right number.

Decore had a giant LED counting display placed on the City Hall information desk. It showed the amount of revenue that EdTel was being denied, right to the minute. He placed newspaper ads with mail-in forms people could use to demand that the premier give EdTel its fair share of long-distance revenue. Tens of thousands of those forms were completed, returned and dumped on the floor at news conferences.

Finally, after a long period of non-response, Lougheed—who had never before known a political defeat—agreed to appoint retired Supreme Court justice Tevie Miller to conduct an inquiry into Edmonton’s claim on its long-distance revenue. Miller eventually sided with the City, and EdTel was suddenly worth tens of millions of dollars more than it was before. The EdTel Endowment Fund, created from profits from the eventual sale of the public company, paid $45-million in dividends to the City of Edmonton in 2023. It ended that year with a market value just shy of $1-billion.

The province’s municipal leaders should be screaming bloody murder.

On another occasion, minister of social services Shirley McLellan announced the government’s intention to withdraw provincial funding for pre- and after-school daycare programs. Knowing how many thousands of families—especially single-parent ones—would be devastated by the withdrawal, Decore met with the minister within days. He calmly informed her that as mayor he had more than 700 buses under his control, each of which could seat 50 moms and kids who were about to be denied these important programs. He asked her to imagine the political effect of 100 or more of those buses—each delivering 50 parents and kids to the front steps of the Legislature—for a giant protest.

The minister reversed her position the next day.

One more great example of Decore’s courage in standing against “greater” powers occurred when Conservative finance minister Michael Wilson was developing rules for the coming imposition of the GST. At a Big City Mayors conference, it was made known that the minister was considering imposing GST on city departments that are provided services by other city departments—for example, when the law department secures rights of way for LRT line extensions.

At the next Big City Mayors meeting, fortuitously held in Ottawa, Decore circulated a dummy copy of a powerfully worded brochure sized to fit inside every city’s monthly utility bill envelope. The brochure bluntly explained the federal government’s intent—and its ultimate inflationary effect on property taxes—and gave all the information necessary for people across the country to phone their complaints to Wilson and prime minister Brian Mulroney’s offices.

Once the mayors approved the strategy, Decore convinced Vancouver mayor Michael Harcourt to walk with him across the street to Wilson’s office and demand to be seen. Wilson could hardly ignore the mayors of two of Canada’s largest cities. He saw them, heard the strategy, read the dummy brochure, recognized the magnitude of their potential political threat… and nothing was ever again heard about imposing the GST on internal civic services.

Decore knew how to use political power. That’s what politicians do when they know why they seek office.

Years before becoming mayor, Decore, as chairman of the Canadian Multicultural Council, organized a lobby effort on behalf of organizations who wanted prime minister Pierre Trudeau to include “multicultural” in the description of Canada in section 27 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Trudeau bitterly resisted, but in the end, the strength of Decore’s national lobby forced Trudeau to acquiesce. The Charter now includes this wording: This Charter shall be interpreted in a manner consistent with the preservation and enhancement of the multicultural heritage of Canadians. That sentence enabled the flow of federal funding to support multicultural organizations.

After that, Trudeau harboured quite a dislike for the mayor of Edmonton. Decore simply didn’t care.

When, a few years later, new prime minister Jean Chrétien was forming his cabinet, Decore called him to promote Anne McLellan—an Edmonton MP well known locally but without national profile—as minister of natural resources, the ministry responsible for oil and other industries. He told Chrétien that McLellan was brilliant, a quick study and respected by the oilpatch. Chrétien, however, was determined to appoint a different MP, one with no connection to Alberta or the oil industry. The prime minister attempted to mollify Decore by telling him it wasn’t necessary to match ministers’ provinces of origin to the nature of their department’s responsibilities. The increasingly tense conversation went back and forth until finally Decore, by now quite ticked off, replied to Chrétien’s argument with: “Damnit, Jean… I’ll believe that when you appoint a fisheries minister from Saskatchewan!”

McLellan was appointed natural resources minister a few days later. She eventually became deputy prime minister.

When Canadian National closed the iconic Macdonald Hotel in 1983, it had become an embarrassment to Edmonton: a missing front tooth, a psycho-logical “downer” that dragged on Decore’s intent to revitalize the downtown. Learning that CN’s CEO was soon to visit Edmonton, Decore invited him to a meeting in his office. The CEO, Decore had heard, was a superior type who was highly conscious of his immense power and often dismissive of lesser mortals. When the CEO appeared, Decore had secretarial staff seat him in the glass-walled waiting room. Decore let him cool his heels in full view of the media for 20 minutes past the agreed meeting time.

When they finally met, after the CEO had explained all the reasons why CN could not possibly reopen the Macdonald, Decore unfolded a large black flag carrying the CN logo in white. He told the CEO that if a reopening were not announced very soon, he would fly the flag permanently in front of City Hall. Further, he threatened to organize a Pied Piper-style march from the City Hall flag-raising to the hotel, led by legendary jazz trombonist Big Miller. Decore threatened to nail up a proclamation at the Macdonald demanding that CN reopen the hotel as a display of its respect for a city whose broader region was responsible for more than half of CN’s national freight revenue.

At the same time, Decore told the CEO he would be equally difficult if CN continued refusing to entertain the relocation of its huge downtown switching yards, a move which would finally free the land to enable developments such as Grant MacEwan University. CN quickly announced the reopening of a significantly upgraded Macdonald Hotel, and within a year it was in negotiation with a councillor over the relocation of its downtown switching yards.

A few years later, as leader of the Alberta Liberal Official Opposition, Decore took his party to within a few thousand votes (in the tightest 10 constituencies) of winning the 1993 provincial election.

The man knew how to use political power. That’s what politicians do when they know why they seek office.

Alex Macdonald was chief of staff to former Edmonton mayor Laurence Decore (1983–1988) and an adviser when Decore became leader of the province’s Official Opposition.

____________________________________________

Support independent local media. Please click to subscribe.

The post Where are the Fearless Mayors? appeared first on Alberta Views.

To top it all off, Guthrie used to be the staunchest of Smith loyalists, and was in fact the first UCP MLA to publicly endorse her in the party’s 2022 leadership race.

“Something doesn’t sit right with me,” Guthrie told the Calgary Herald after leaving cabinet. “It doesn’t pass the smell test, plain and simple. We should have core values, and being against corruption should be one of those, right?”

Without getting into the complicated details of what the Alberta NDP quickly dubbed the “CorruptCare” scandal—and putting aside the UCP later booting Guthrie from caucus altogether—the man’s decision to leave cabinet on a matter of principle was a monumental moment in Alberta politics.

What were his cabinet colleagues thinking that afternoon… Most tried to brush off the resignation while expressing support for the premier. But in my opinion the “best” response, in terms of bluster verging on chutzpah, came from municipal affairs minister Ric McIver. “People quit their jobs every day,” McIver said with a verbal shrug.

“People quit their jobs every day,” McIver said with a verbal shrug. But what Guthrie did was truly without precedent.

It was a laughable response. And I, standing an arm’s length away, had to stifle a guffaw. Cabinet ministers don’t quit their jobs with the same regularity as, say, high school students at McDonald’s. McIver, a political veteran, knows this. But what’s a politician to do when a well-respected member of the inner circle not only leaves but tosses a live grenade into the room on his way out?

What Guthrie did was truly without precedent.

Oh, we’ve had Alberta cabinet ministers quit over the decades. Lots have resigned their cabinet posts to run in leadership races. We’ve seen them quit over scandals. In 1983 solicitor general Graham Harle resigned from cabinet after he was caught by police in a government vehicle with a prostitute—and tried to convince Albertans he was merely conducting a one-man investigation into prostitution.

In November 2021 agriculture minister Devin Dreeshen quit cabinet after the news media reported on his heavy drinking binges in his legislature office, when staff would cry out “Shields up!” and lock the doors to prevent outsiders entering.

Sometimes ministers are sacrificed to defuse a scandal undermining the government. In January 2021 municipal affairs minister Tracy Allard resigned after a gaggle of government MLAs travelled internationally against pandemic restrictions.

But how often has an Alberta cabinet minister resigned over a matter of principle And how often while also pointedly criticizing their premier?

There is one similar case, sort of, on the federal front. In 2013 Edmonton-St. Albert MP Brent Rathgeber voluntarily quit the federal Conservative caucus after complaining about the “boys in short pants” in the Prime Minister’s Office interfering in his ability to represent his constituents.

But putting principle ahead of political power and perks is rare. We seem to be in a post-responsibility world. Politicians, even those who are guilty of misdeeds, too often cling to power by their fingertips, refusing to quit. And their leaders oblige.

Take the notorious example of Alberta justice minister Kaycee Madu who, after receiving a $300 ticket from a police officer for distracted driving in a school zone in March 2021, immediately phoned Edmonton’s police chief. Madu later insisted he hadn’t been trying to get the ticket quashed but, as a Black man, was trying to determine if he was the victim of racial profiling.

An independent investigator, hired by the government, determined that even though Madu did not interfere with the administration of justice, he had attempted to interfere, and there was a reasonable perception he had interfered. Those should have been reasons to permanently boot Madu from cabinet, but instead, after giving him a time-out from cabinet during the investigation, Kenney merely shuffled Madu from the justice portfolio to labour.

And after Madu endorsed Smith in the UCP leadership race, she rewarded him by naming him deputy premier.

Voters in Madu’s riding of Edmonton-South West passed judgment by voting Madu out of office in the 2023 general election. Ultimately it’s reassuring to know that if politicians won’t do the right thing and leave, voters always have the power to kick them out.

Graham Thomson is a political analyst, member of the Legislature Press Gallery and former Edmonton Journal political columnist.

____________________________________________

Support independent local media. Please click to subscribe.

The post The Minister Who Quit appeared first on Alberta Views.

Then, she reaches over and hands them a bunch of sunflower seeds. “Take these seeds and put them in your pockets, so at least sunflowers will grow when you all lie down here.”

Three years on, Ukraine is still fighting, still resisting. The human costs have been dire. But almost no one, in February of 2022, thought Ukraine would be able to withstand the Russian invasion and fight back so ferociously.

Lately I’ve been thinking about the extraordinary bravery and wit of that one Ukrainian woman, and what she came to symbolize about individual courage and national resolve.

When Donald Trump first started making “jokes” about Canada’s independence, calling us the 51st state, referring to our head of government not as prime minister but as governor, I, like most Canadians, just rolled my eyes. It seemed pretty obvious he was trolling us, trying to get a rise out of us. And it seemed like the mature and rational thing for us to refuse to take the bait. Trump is and always has been an attention junkie. Responding to his goad, giving him the attention he craves, felt like the wrong response.

Over the course of my lifetime I’ve dealt with a little brother. I’ve raised a toddler. I’ve trained two dogs. And the thing you learn, when they misbehave, or whine, or tease you, is to ignore them, and to not give them the reaction they’re looking for.

Trump, even now, is testing our national resolve—and weighing our capacity for humiliation.

But Trump’s online assaults on our sovereignty didn’t stop. The snarky put-downs went on and on.

Then the American media began normalizing this bonkers discourse. “The president-elect has suggested a territorial expansion into Panama, Greenland and Canada,” CNN reported. “If he’s serious, it would rival the Louisiana Purchase.”

Territorial expansion That’s a euphemism you could well imagine TASS or Russia Today employing to discuss Putin’s invasion of Crimea.

But then, the most disturbing twist. High-profile Canadian conservatives starting publicly celebrating and promoting the idea of some kind of latter-day Anschluss, gleefully talking up the economic potential of being absorbed into the United States. With deluded naïveté, they seemed to believe that Canada—with their help—could negotiate some kind of partnership, instead of understanding that a Trump-led America would never see us as equals.

It was a craven display. How embarrassing to watch these high-profile Canadian politicians, business leaders and pundits rolling over, eagerly exposing their bellies to the most dominant dog at the dog park.

How Trump (and Putin) must be laughing at the sight of these Canadian quislings, slobbering over themselves to sell out their country for 30 pieces of silver.

The sad spectacle really made me wonder. Would we, as Canadians, ever have the resolve of the Ukrainian people, to stand up for our country if push came to shove Would I, a middle-aged woman in a parka and a toque, have the courage to confront armed invaders, with nothing more than a pocket full of sunflower seeds for protection?

To be clear, I don’t seriously believe that the Americans, under Trump, are ever likely to stage an armed invasion. I’m not expecting soldiers to march from Sweetgrass through Coutts. No. The attacks will be more subtle. Trump and his government will be looking to undermine our political sovereignty and our capacity for self-determination in hundreds of ways, on issues from trade and investment to immigration and refugee policy, from environmental regulation to national defence. Trump, even now, is testing our national resolve—and weighing our capacity for humiliation.

And in this moment of trial we need to find ways to transcend our ideological and party differences. We need our premiers and our federal leaders to be working in concert, or at least in grudging cooperation, to protect our national interests and to remind us all—and to remind the whole world—of what makes Canada so remarkable.

We won’t do that by scoring on our own net, nor by selling out the principles and values that make us who we are. The next four years are going to be challenging for the whole world, and the rules-based international order we have known for decades will itself be under siege.

When the world, when our allies, look to Canada for moral leadership and moral example, I hope we will stand ready to provide it. And ready to plant the seeds for a future we can be proud to call our own.

Paula Simons is an independent senator and the host of the podcast Alberta Unbound. She lives in Edmonton.

____________________________________________

Support independent local media. Please click to subscribe.

The post Quibbling with Quislings appeared first on Alberta Views.

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.

____________________________________________

Support independent local media. Please click to subscribe.

The post A Work in Progress appeared first on Alberta Views.

Consider this also my disclosure that I’m a party member—reluctantly—and a confession that I’ve spent much of the past 20 years needing to hope, usually against all evidence, that the results of a democratic vote in Alberta might pleasantly surprise me. They’ve done so on a few rare and exquisite occasions, the two most notable ones involving both the party gathering that day and its frontrunner candidate—though not both at the same time.

I’d watched in delighted shock as Naheed Nenshi won his first mayoral race in Calgary in October 2010. I’d stood with thousands of others in front of the Legislature in Edmonton in May 2015 with my jaw agape to Looney-Tunes-character levels, still unable to fully process that I was watching Alberta’s NDP being sworn in as the new government. (I wasn’t a party member then and I still don’t like being one, but for now I’m reluctantly in the wing of the party that is genuinely bothered that my Alberta NDP membership also means I’m nominally a federal NDP member.) And now I’d arrived at the Hyatt Regency’s Imperial Ballroom to witness Nenshi being chosen as the NDP’s new leader. A few months earlier this outcome might’ve shocked me nearly as much as that first mayoral victory. Nenshi was very much not a partisan of the NDP (or any other party). But the result was a certainty by the time it was made official.

Calgary Herald, October 19, 2010

Alberta Views, April 2011

The route by which we’d arrived at this moment is likely familiar to anyone paying even casual attention to Alberta politics, but here’s my condensed version: In 2023, as the culmination of a stunning political comeback, Danielle Smith led the United Conservative Party to re-election  and retained her position as premier. She did so by winning virtually every non-urban seat in the province, along with just enough ridings in Calgary to seal the deal. Her margin of victory consisted of only a few thousand votes in close Calgary races, making electoral success in that city appear absolutely crucial for winning a provincial election from here on out. This is all uncharted territory for Alberta politics, because until 2023 there hadn’t been a genuinely close two-horse race here in living memory.

The slim margin of victory notwithstanding, Danielle Smith was premier again, and in her return to power she summarily commenced to do Danielle Smith sorts of things. These included, in just the first few months, upending the management and structure of the healthcare system, actively impeding the province’s wildly successful renewable energy business, and tossing aside a long-standing rhetorical commitment to LGBTQ+ rights to bring in new policies designed to make life worse and more dangerous for LGBTQ+ youth. This last Danielle Smith sort of thing may have been the final straw for Nenshi, who’d surely been hearing pleas to consider a run at the NDP leadership since the day he stepped down as mayor in 2021. He joined LGBTQ+ activists in February 2024, in front of the very City Hall he’d once presided over, to deliver a ferocious and powerful rebuttal to Smith’s new policies, which would change the rules around gender-affirming healthcare and oblige schools to notify parents of a child’s name change (and require parental consent for those under the age of 15). Effectively, it would soon be provincial policy that school administrators must out trans kids to their parents whether the kids were ready for that or not.

An NDP leadership race had never been like this one: the stakes had never been as high.

Nenshi’s speech at that rally left no doubt that he took Smith’s abandonment of her commitment to protect LGBTQ+ youth personally. He has known her since they were both active in campus politics at the University of Calgary in the early 1990s, and he claimed he’d taken her at her word that she wouldn’t do anything as premier to make the province less safe for those kids. This makes it highly plausible that whatever mix of factors convinced Nenshi to abandon his own long-standing commitment to non-partisanship, Smith’s new socially conservative policies regarding LGBTQ+ youth ranked high on the list. (I know Nenshi socially, but I’m not privy to any of his thinking on this decision.)

In any case, the former mayor declared his intention to seek the Alberta NDP leadership in March, five weeks after that City Hall rally. And his candidacy summarily changed the dynamics of the race with all the subtlety of a prairie hailstorm. Within weeks, the party’s membership numbers had risen to such a stunning degree that one of the candidates, Edmonton MLA Rakhi Pancholi, viewed as a strong contender for the leadership, ended her campaign and shifted her support to Nenshi.

There followed the usual mechanics of a party leadership race—stump speeches and town-hall meetings, social media ads and debates—but no objective observer expected any result other than the one that greeted us on that sunny June day.

At the Calgary Pride Festival, September 2023.

So join me back at the Hyatt Regency. Ride up with me on the escalator from the lobby. Overhear a prominent Calgary Sun columnist a few steps farther up discussing his summer holiday plans. And soak in the obvious symbolism of Alberta’s NDP gathering in a luxury conference hotel’s Imperial Ballroom in the heart of corporate Calgary to welcome its new leader. Historically, the NDP is not corporate, nor luxurious, nor based in Calgary. And if you go far enough back—not that far, really, perhaps to 2014, when the NDP was fourth in the provincial seat count—that Sun columnist up ahead of me on the escalator surely didn’t feel obliged to cover their leadership events, because it didn’t matter much to Calgarians who the head of the provincial NDP happened to be.

Let’s skip ahead now past some friendly nods and how-ya-doins to the main event. The party faithful now gathered to fill the room, the small talk friendly and anxious, the number of faces I associate primarily with Nenshi’s municipal politics running roughly 1:1 with faces I associate primarily with Calgary’s fledgling NDP machine.

Greetings from the Grand Hyatt ballroom’s podium on this day fell to Joe Ceci, the former NDP finance minister and de facto head of the party’s Calgary caucus. Ceci opened with a short, vivid anecdote about how far the party had come. When he’d first mulled a run for a provincial seat in the months ahead of the 2015 election, he said, he’d given real consideration to running as an independent. Not even a decade ago, the NDP’s standing in Calgary had been so weak that it didn’t seem to offer him anything that a resourceful candidate with the organization and name-recognition of a former city councillor couldn’t cobble together for himself.

Even if he was overstating how seriously he’d considered the indie approach, who could’ve blamed him if he’d gone that way Ceci was, after all, a Calgary progressive, and he knew as well as anyone in the room what that had meant before 2015. It meant there was no clear path to victory at the provincial or the federal level and never had been. So what did it matter which party banner you stood under The goal for a Calgary progressive running in a provincial election was to try to steal a single seat in the Legislature, where your likely role in the real business of government would at best consist of trying to broker a deal or two with the reigning conservatives to get some pale facsimile of your ideals embedded in the legislation they were rubber-stamping. Provincial politics were dynastic in Alberta, and the dynasties were conservative. Serious opposition to the regime came almost exclusively from breakaway factions in its own ranks. But a progressive Running in Calgary Red, orange, purple—the colour of the banner barely mattered at all.

The dynastic nature of Alberta politics isn’t news, I realize. But the full scale of it is worth pausing to marvel at. From 1935, when William Aberhart’s Social Credit party defeated the United Farmers of Alberta to form government, until 2015, when conservatives spread their votes evenly enough across two parties to hand the Legislature to the NDP, there had been one change in governing party. Of the nine Social Credit governments, only two controlled less than two-thirds of the province’s seats. The Progressive Conservatives formed 12 governments, and only two of those—the one that brought them to power in 1971 and the Liberals’ near-miss in 1993—were majorities of less than two-thirds. Tally it up: 21 governments, one change in ruling party, and essentially no serious challenge to conservative rule other than that interregnum between the Lougheed and Klein dynasties, when King Ralph was left to eke out his first win in 1993. To be a progressive in this 80-year epoch was to make some sort of peace either with occupying the thin progressive section of the conservative benches or residing forever in the wilderness of no-hope opposition, alongside a dozen or so other lonely souls.

All of that changed with the NDP’s shocking victory in 2015—possibly forever. And everything since, including Joe Ceci’s fun little warmup joke about seeing more hope in flying solo than in riding with the party that won the whole election, has been an exercise, by turns giddy and gut-churning, in trying to map out the new landscape on the fly and find the strongest footing in this wild new terrain.

In 2024 winning the leadership of the NDP meant, for the first time ever, taking the reins of a progressive party with a legitimate shot at forming the next government. There had never been an NDP leadership race like this one, because the stakes had never been as high. There’d barely even been stakes before.

June 22, 2024. Nenshi got 86 per cent of the vote. In his victory speech he shared his vision of an Alberta ready to “start dreaming big.”

So that was the NDP’s path to this moment. What about mine I was looking on from the sidelines at the Hyatt Regency that day, knowing—before his name was called—that I’d registered my vote for the victor. And, yes, wishing I hadn’t been obliged to also become a member of the federal NDP in order to do so.

I take party affiliations seriously. It matters less to my kind of journalism than it does to a daily reporter on the government beat, but I don’t ever want anyone to assume I’m speaking for anyone but myself. I’ve only been a party member at any level twice before. The first time was a federal NDP membership, which I bought to lend my support to Jack Layton’s run for the leadership in 2003 because he was the first politician I’d ever heard talk sensibly and at the appropriate scale about the climate crisis. I let that membership lapse when Layton’s NDP cynically attacked good climate policy to hasten the destruction of the Liberals under Stéphane Dion and his “Green Shift” platform in the 2008 election. The federal NDP has still not restored real coherence to its climate policies—which is, in part, why I resented being made to join the party as a necessary condition of my Alberta NDP membership.

From a base of 16,277, the party grew to 85,277 members eligible to vote for the new leader.

The next membership I took out was with the Green Party of Canada, so I could run as (and vote for myself as) the Green candidate in the 2012 Calgary-Centre by-election. I let that one lapse when the Liberals arrived with a workable and effective climate policy package in 2015. I was a member of no party when Nenshi declared his candidacy for the Alberta NDP. One of his stated goals on the campaign trail was to consider whether the party should maintain its formal partnership with the federal party. It’s not a trivial question, and it cuts to the core of what kind of party the Alberta NDP is and wants to become.

Back at the Hyatt’s Imperial Ballroom, Joe Ceci ceded the podium to a series of officials variously touting the party’s bedrock social democratic values and celebrating the fact of its extraordinary growth during the leadership campaign. The numbers were legitimately impressive—from a base of 16,277 at the start of the race, the party had grown to 85,277 members now eligible to vote for the new leader. The surge in membership was widely acknowledged to have been a product of the attention that accompanied Nenshi’s candidacy—particularly in Calgary. And it is likely in Calgary where the question of the Alberta NDP’s federal ties is most urgent.

When Nenshi raised the issue during the campaign, Rachel Notley responded with a full-throated defence of the formal federal link that provides a particularly clear illustration of the limits to the party’s growth—in appeal, perhaps also in imagination—under an old-school NDP leader. In an interview with the Calgary Herald, Notley responded to Nenshi’s challenge by pointing out that she first met Tommy Douglas when she was just four years old, which is about as strong as bragging rights get in NDP circles. “The idea of running away from that brand is to me silly, superficial, short-sighted,” she said.

When I ran for Parliament in Calgary in 2012, I quickly learned that long-time campaign volunteers share a lore about the parties. Conservatives tend to run the most aggressive campaigns, Liberals the most arrogant ones. But no party, so goes the lore, is as fiercely partisan as the NDP. NDP campaigns have a reputation for trusting in fellow Dippers from afar over local experts lacking sufficient party ties. The NDP would rather maintain righteous internal agreement on a key issue than massage a position to win a race. They too often prefer the correct stance over the best tactics. And that perhaps explains, at least in part, why Notley’s NDP, facing an uphill battle to unseat an unpopular UCP government in 2023, came to the conclusion that unveiling plans for a corporate tax hike was a move worth making in the middle of a struggle to win over Calgary voters wary of a party considered hostile to business.

I can’t say exactly how Notley and her team arrived at that particular decision, and I can’t say with certainty that it was a pivotal factor in the NDP falling a few thousand votes short of victory in a handful of Calgary ridings that would’ve delivered enough seats to win the election. But I do know that political insiders familiar with the lore thought it was exactly on brand. Maddeningly on brand. Which is why changing the brand does in fact matter—because it’s not just the brand that changes under a leader with no previous party affiliations but the whole way the party thinks. And to consistently compete for and win elections in Alberta, the NDP needs to learn how to think differently from its old-school roots. It shouldn’t feel in any way like it is abandoning those roots—the party’s long history of championing workers’ rights and building social democracy are assets in Calgary as much as they are to its long-standing Edmonton supporters. But it must become a party with a broader and more nimble imagination, a party that can attract votes from Lougheed Tories and traditional Liberals recently arrived from the rest of Canada as readily as from its union-backed “Redmonton” base.

I attended a leadership debate at the BMO Centre in Calgary in mid-May, and Kathleen Ganley summed up the NDP’s experience in the 2023 election this way: “We were right about everything. But it wasn’t enough.” The candidates on stage—Sarah Hoffman, Gil McGowan and Jodi Calahoo Stonehouse, in addition to Ganley and Nenshi—spent a good portion of the debate praising each other, tacitly agreeing with Ganley’s assertion that the party was on the right side of the issues. All also agreed, though, that the NDP had to expand its appeal beyond its traditional base. Being right was not enough—the party needed to learn how to win in the two-horse races to come.

Vigorous agreement doesn’t produce many sparks, but Hoffman and Nenshi did engage in a heated exchange over the City of Calgary’s closure of a mobile home park under his mayoral watch. Nenshi defended his record vigorously, and the discussion spun off into policy esoterica. I happened to look over just then and notice that Zain Velji, the Nenshi campaign’s co-director, was seated just across from me in an empty row at the back of the room. His gaze never left his phone throughout, nor showed the slightest concern at the sharp attack his candidate was fending off. I’ve known Velji since he chipped in on my campaign in 2012, and I know first-hand that he understands the lore as well as anyone. He didn’t seem at all worried—and didn’t need to be—that Nenshi’s social-democratic bona fides were being called into question. The tens of thousands of new members registering to vote in the leadership race were not rushing in to argue over shades of orange in an urban housing policy. They were coming because they reckoned the party’s tent might finally be broad enough for them, and because the ringleader they were coming to vote for might attract a crowd big enough to win the next election.

I was surprised by the results after all. Not by the outcome—Naheed Nenshi won easily—but by the sheer size of the victory. I’m not an NDP loyalist, not aware of its internal dynamics. I’d heard rumblings about an old guard that might rally a bit against the insurgent and assumed there was some truth behind those rumours. Instead, the announcement of the vote tally, when it came, echoed around the Imperial Ballroom to affirm a coronation. Nenshi received 86 per cent of the vote. The nearest runner-up (Ganley) came in at only 8 per cent. I wasn’t expecting multiple runoff tallies or anything, but I didn’t anticipate such a landslide.

Elation filled the room. No surprise there—everyone on the winning side in politics seems at least a little delirious about it all, regardless of the stakes. What struck me the most was the sort of tableau the elation created. In his victory speech, Nenshi contrasted his vision of an Alberta ready to “start dreaming big” against the small-minded, defensive, backward-looking UCP version. He described his province not as a “fortress to be defended” but as a “wide-open door with a welcome mat.” And then, one by one, he called up the members of the NDP caucus to attest bodily to that vision.

Here was an NDP caucus showing legitimate, lived-in diversity with effortless ease. Here was an NDP caucus numerous enough to fill the Hyatt Regency’s stage to overflowing—something few progressive caucuses in the province’s history could accomplish. Here, more than that, was an NDP caucus that looked and felt like the Alberta I’ve known and loved best in my 20 years as a resident and sometime dreamer of brighter political futures, a place that truly is remarkable in its open-mindedness and progressive ambition. If that isn’t the only Alberta there is, it’s the one that has been most notably absent as a permanent presence in its politics for most of the dynastic conservative epoch.

Here was a real, united, ambitious opposition, ready and able to contend for power not just in the next election but in any number after that. Never has that existed in Alberta’s progressive politics. And that’s why I’m willing to hope, to dream—to bet, even—that an entire new epoch began on that first Saturday of summer in downtown Calgary.

Calgary’s Chris Turner is the author most recently of How to Be a Climate Optimist, which won the 2023 Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing.

____________________________________________

Support independent local media. Please click to subscribe.

The post Mass Appeal appeared first on Alberta Views.