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).

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To this Danielle Smith added: “I assure you, so do I.”

She wasn’t silent for long. In fact, the day before Smith quit the radio, she announced her new account at locals.com, a libertarian videoblogging site, where she could resume speaking her truth, only this time directly to an audience of paying subscribers and free from repercussions from boss, advertiser or mob. At least one freelance journalist paid for full access to Smith’s content. This is how non-subscribers could learn, for example, that Smith decorates her High River home office with the US revolutionary Gadsden Flag, a coiling rattlesnake—“Don’t Tread on Me”—said to represent the individual standing up to unjust authority. Snippets of Smith’s more controversial videos (on COVID, vaccines, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine) began circulating on social media.

The municipal realm is “the healthiest level of government.” Smith, 2022

But on May 13, 2022, a year into her newfound freedom, Danielle Smith said something on locals.com that a great many Albertans would agree with. Sitting at her desk, wearing a grey blazer, she first read aloud a subscriber’s two-part question: “What are your thoughts on other electoral systems Do you think there’s one best suited to represent the views of most Albertans?”

“You know,” Smith began, “my leading contender, if you want the truth, would probably be… Nunavut’s system, or the [one] you see in a lot of rural municipalities in Alberta.

“You get elected as an independent, based on your own steam. You get elected based on who you are, what you stand for. You’re not tied by some kind of partisan restriction. You don’t have some leader who can decide to punish you. You don’t have some leader who can decide not to sign your nomination papers.” (Here Smith chuckled; she was by May 2022 trying to re-enter politics by seeking a UCP nomination, and needed leader Jason Kenney’s blessing.)

“So… you’re removing the partisan labels and you’re just choosing the best person for the job,” she said. “I know—what a concept…! I think maybe we’re too polarized now. [But] when you look at the municipal level of government, it’s kind of the healthiest level of government.”

Her opinion was uncontroversial then. It’s notable now. Because just two days after praising non-partisan politics, Smith’s life again turned upside down when UCP members ousted Kenney. Smith dropped her UCP nomination bid. She leapt into the leadership race. She won. Eight months later she led her UCP to a general election win. And then premier Smith injected a heavy dose of partisanship into Alberta’s healthiest level of government.

A Janet Brown poll found that two in three Albertans want municipal candidates to be independent.

In October 2022, in just her third week as premier, Smith used a Calgary Sun columnist to float a trial balloon. She was being lobbied to legislate municipal parties, she said. “Calgary wants it, and Edmonton wants it too. There seems to be an appetite for it.” The Edmonton Journal later reported that third-party advertiser Take Back Alberta (TBA) was in fact behind the push.

Smith owes TBA. The group infiltrated the UCP—in leader David Parker’s words, “declaring war on Jason Kenney”—and orchestrated the premier’s removal through a leadership review. Its support was critical to Smith’s subsequent party leadership win. But the policy document that emerged from the UCP’s late-October AGM, Smith’s first convention as leader, at which TBA supporters dominated policy discussions, was silent on municipal parties. So too was the UCP platform during the spring 2023 election campaign.

By fall 2023, however, Smith said she was serious about bringing in municipal parties. Local politicians were angry. Calgary mayor Jyoti Gondek called it “the kiss of death for local representation.” Red Deer mayor Ken Johnson called the idea a “poor move,” saying cities should be “unfettered by party or partisan politics.” Cathy Heron, president of Alberta Municipalities, said partisan politics creates “votes along party lines or the party thought process. And so it doesn’t lead to good governance of a municipality.”

The sentiment went beyond politicians. “This is a terrible idea, and the public knows it,” Edmonton Journal reporter Keith Gerein tweeted. “Albertans don’t want it, the UCP didn’t campaign on it—but hey, why let those factors get in the way?” Said Andrew Knack, former Edmonton ward Nakota Isga councillor and current mayoral candidate, “If you’re looking at the provincial or the federal systems, that partisan system that’s set up, how many Albertans would really look at that and say, ‘Yeah, I want more of that municipally?’”

A Janet Brown poll in September 2023 found that two in three Albertans (68 per cent) want municipal candidates to be independent. Only one in four (24 per cent) want parties. Fully 81 per cent say their main concern is councillors “who are part of a political party would vote along party lines, and not necessarily in the best interest of the community.” Most (69 per cent) agree “parties would make municipal governments more divisive and less effective.”

Premier Smith commissioned her own survey that November. The results, published in late January 2024 in the Edmonton Journal—after that paper filed a freedom of information request—showed that more than 70 per cent of respondents were opposed to seeing parties on local ballots.

By this point Smith was back on the radio, on a Saturday-morning province-wide call-in show co-broadcast by 770 CHQR and 880 CHED. On the February 24, 2024, edition of “Your Province, Your Premier,” she said parties would now be legislated only in Alberta’s two biggest cities. The rationale was no longer that Edmonton and Calgary were asking for the change; it was that those cities’ elected representatives weren’t truly independent. “The smaller the municipality, I don’t know that they’re as partisan,” she said. “But when you get into a city the size of Calgary or Edmonton, you better believe it’s partisan.” The solution to this lack of independence, she suggested, was to tether councillors and mayors to parties, thus creating “more transparency.”

Her government introduced the Municipal Affairs Statutes Amendment Act, 2024, that spring. It defined municipal parties, which can’t be formally affiliated with provincial or federal parties, and created them in time for October 2025’s civic elections. The bill passed in fall 2024 with all UCP MLAs in favour and all NDP MLAs against. Said then-municipal affairs minister Ric McIver, parties will ensure councils “make decisions that are clearly in Alberta’s interest and reflect the transparency and fairness the citizens of Alberta deserve.”

If citizens deserve better, Smith’s prescription is tough to swallow. Since the time of Plato, people have been wary of their fellows who seek power. Trustworthiness surveys today rank politicians last, below even car salespeople and ad executives. A cottage industry of articles and books explores the “unique narcissism” of politicians. MPs and MLAs call their colleagues liars, incompetent, “a colossal piece of shit” or worse, and dismiss the parliaments and legislatures they themselves serve in as “daycares” and “kindergartens.”

But parties earn special contempt. An Environics study measuring trust in political institutions from 2010 to 2023 found that while 35–41 per cent of Canadians express “a lot” of pride in our political system, only 6–17 per cent have the same level of support for parties. The municipal realm performs at least twice as well as partisan politics, with “a lot of support” ranging from 16 to 31 per cent. (Other than Montreal and three cities in BC, most Canadian cities don’t have parties.)

In 2019 Angus Reid found that nearly two-thirds of Canadians say politicians can’t be trusted. One-third of Canadians believe politicians are primarily motivated by “personal gain” rather than a genuine desire to serve their communities. Forty per cent say the problem is getting worse. Again municipal politicians performed better, perhaps because most don’t belong to parties.

Clips from the House of Commons and legislatures confirm the public’s suspicions. Grownups in suits shout at grownups in suits, or heckle, jeer and bang on desks—behaviour that in a normal workplace would get you fired. Ads show grainy photos of party leaders at their worst (scowling, shrugging, sweaty) with circus music and out of context quotes. Party bots send frothy text messages as much to harvest respondents’ data as to influence voters. (In the 2025 campaign a Conservative “flash survey” gave as one of respondents’ two options on crime policy: “I want dangerous criminals terrorizing my streets.”) Once elected, parties often appoint their own donors and one-time candidates to “non-partisan” positions on public boards and commissions and pay them to write “independent” public reports.

Even the “healthiest level of government” isn’t perfect. But lacking party loyalties and machinery, civic politics doesn’t stoop to the blood sport and cronyism of federal or provincial politics. Organizations that seek more diverse political representation in Canada say the potential for collaboration and civil disagreement at city hall—and less need of powerful connections to get elected in the first place—is why newcomers or members of under-represented groups considering a run for office often prefer the municipal level.

This may already be changing. “I entered [politics] with an expectation that teamwork would win the day and that city hall would be a space for practical problem-solving and dialogue,” said Evan Spencer, Ward 12 councillor, in a February 2025 Calgary Herald column. “After all, municipalities are responsible for delivering essential services—transit, infrastructure, community safety—without the partisan baggage that dominates higher levels of government.”

“Or at least,” Spencer wrote, “that’s how it should be. Unfortunately, the political climate has shifted dramatically… Municipal councils are succumbing to the pressures of party politics. This transformation threatens the very foundation of local democracy. Party politics, by its nature, demands loyalty to a platform, a leader and a base of supporters. This dynamic creates an environment where councillors are pressured to vote along ideological lines rather than engage in the give-and-take necessary for effective governance.” After one term, Spencer isn’t running again.

The problem of elected representatives prioritizing their party over the people who elected them sometimes erupts to the surface.

In May 2015 junior-high teacher Robyn Luff was elected for the provincial NDP in Calgary-East. Here, in working-class Dover, Forest Lawn and Penbrooke Meadows, incomes are $9,000 below the provincial average and the percentage of renters is 30 per cent higher. Rents in Alberta back then were rising at three times the inflation rate, and nothing stopped a landlord from hiking the rent as much as they liked. Luff’s constituents wanted a limit—and a modest rent cap was in the NDP platform in late 2014. Rachel Notley called premier Jim Prentice’s notion that the market could deal with a housing affordability crisis “profoundly irresponsible.”

But by the following summer, after the NDP had toppled the PCs, rent caps were off the table. Said municipal affairs minister Deron Bilous, “Quite frankly… our government is not at this time looking to rent controls.” An undeterred Luff brought forward a private member’s bill in 2016 that included a proposed 2 per cent cap. The premier’s office told Luff to water it down. The bill was sent to committee, where it languished.

Two years later Luff was kicked out of caucus. The NDP said she didn’t understand party discipline. Luff said she wasn’t being allowed to represent her constituents. “Every power that MLAs are supposed to have has been taken away,” she said in a statement. “MLAs must vote at the direction of the leader at all times [a.k.a. whipped votes]. Questions from private members are written by ministries and given to them to ask… Decisions about who speaks in the House and to what bill are all made ahead of time by party leadership. Statements and questions at committee are all highly scripted and agreed upon ahead of time. If MLAs should choose to go against any of these directives, there’s a fear they’ll lose privileges …they’ll be isolated, their political career will be finished, their nomination papers will not be signed.”

Luff said stifling MLAs “leads to hyperpartisan rhetoric and to no actual debate on bills. Everything that happens in the House is predetermined, rendering everything that happens there to nothing more than a vehicle for scoring partisan points.… This is a mockery of representation and a tragedy of democracy.”

That MLAs are powerless, votes are whipped and messages tightly controlled is “modus operandi” for all parties, Mount Royal University professor Duane Bratt told the CBC. “Everything [Luff] described… sounded like traditional party behaviour.”

Stifling MLAs “leads to hyperpartisan rhetoric and no actual debate… a mockery of representation.”

More recently, Lesser Slave Lake MLA Scott Sinclair and Airdrie-Cochrane MLA Pete Guthrie said their UCP colleagues were prioritizing party interests over the public good. Sinclair refused to support the 2025 budget because it has little for healthcare and highway improvements in his riding but does have $183-million to help the Edmonton Oilers. He was kicked out of caucus. Guthrie said premier Smith had “deliberately” misled caucus about procurement issues at AHS, where reportedly over $600-million in public contracts were given to a UCP donor. He was kicked out a month after Sinclair. “Competent, honest governance has taken a backseat to political manoeuvrings that jeopardize the best interest of Albertans,” wrote Guthrie.

None of this is new. Edmonton-Meadowlark MLA Maurice Tougas, in the May 2009 edition of Alberta Views, described the legislature as badly scripted theatre. “Very early on in my term, I came to the realization that it hardly mattered what was said… 90 per cent of what was said in the Legislature was irrelevant.” Brent Rathgeber, a St. Albert MP who in 2013 quit the Conservatives to sit as an independent, said prime minister Stephen Harper’s staff would pressure caucus to obey talking points and vote “like trained seals.” With backbenchers tightly scripted, he said, “MPs don’t represent their constituents in Ottawa, they represent the government to their constituents.”

Since 2008, the Ontario-based Samara Centre for Democracy has conducted exit interviews with 160 MPs from across the political spectrum. In the book Tragedy of the Commons, MPs describe to Samara the fealty of party politics. “Almost without fail,” the interviewers write, “each MP describes the tremendous influence of their political party. From the manipulation of the nomination process to enforced voting in the House and in committees, the unseen hand of the party dominates every aspect of the MP’s existence.”

When Smith in 2024 brought in legislation to add parties to municipal politics, Robyn Luff tweeted: “The literal best thing about municipal politics in Alberta is that there are no political parties.”

In politics, language that conveys a specific message to one group and a different one to the wider public is called a “dog whistle,” named for the ultrasonic tool that’s inaudible to people but heard by their pets. Smith is telling us she doesn’t much like party politics; all she wants is to create “transparency.”

But that’s the dog whistle. “Transparency,” to the Albertans who wanted municipal parties, evidently means something different: We want more conservatives to get elected.

Alberta’s reputation as a conservative monoculture stems from the provincial PCs’ 44-year reign and from federal politics, where, over the dozen elections before 2025, 94 per cent of seats were won by Conservatives or Reformers. But our cities produce much more diverse representation. Progressive mayors Jan Reimer and Don Iveson in Edmonton, and Dave Bronconnier, Al Duerr and Naheed Nenshi in Calgary, served multiple terms. Prominent conservatives such as Calgary’s McIver (in 2010) and Edmonton’s Kerry Diotte (in 2013) failed in their mayoral bids. Progressives such as Brian Mason, Linda Sloan, Karen Leibovici, Bob Hawkesworth and Joe Ceci went on from city politics to win provincial seats for the NDP or the Liberals.

That the same Albertan might vote for a Conservative federally, the NDP provincially and for Iveson or Nenshi municipally shouldn’t be impossible to fathom. Different levels of government face different challenges and have unique responsibilities. And municipal issues are thought to be less ideological. As former New York City mayor Fiorello La Guardia said: “There’s no Republican or Democratic way to pick up the garbage.”

But in October 2021 high-profile conservatives in Alberta’s biggest
cities were trounced. In Calgary, mayor Gondek soundly defeated Jeromy Farkas, a former Manning Centre fellow. In Edmonton Amarjeet Sohi beat one-time UCP nominee Mike Nickel by 20 percentage points. A CTV reporter put a fine point on things: “Alberta’s two largest cities are now led by progressive people of colour.”

The results especially grated on conservatives who feel entitled to win every election in Alberta. The creation of municipal parties could fix this “mistake” of municipal politics. Calgary Herald columnist Rob Breakenridge: “It seems obvious that this is about stacking the deck in support of like-minded candidates in two cities where conservatives have often been on the losing end,” he wrote in April 2024. “Provincial and federal conservatives tend to fare much better, and that’s not lost on this government. There is, of course, the added bonus of potentially dealing with more-pliant city councils.”

Calgary Ward 13’s Dan McLean was one of the few councillors to openly embrace parties. He’s also a special breed of partisan, tweeting that if the Liberals won the 2025 election, “Canada will be invaded by the US.” He’s running for A Better Calgary (ABC), the city’s first party. McLean predicts more conservatives will now get elected in cities where otherwise “far-left” candidates hide their agendas and “common sense” right-wingers split the vote. “I feel like the majority when I walk out the doors,” he told the Calgary Sun. “[But] when I’m at city hall it’s all, like, ‘We’re doing the right things’ and ‘We’re saving the planet.’ With political parties, you’d have to identify who you are and what policies you stand by.”

But proponents of municipal parties may be missing a larger point. Danielle Smith, for example, when she re-emerged from the political wilderness in 2022, said she knew what she’d done wrong. “What I learned,” she told reporters, “is that a party doesn’t belong to its leader—a party belongs to its members.” But arguably a party doesn’t belong to its leader or its members but to its voters.

University of Waterloo political scientist Emmett Macfarlane writes in a 2025 Substack essay that Canadian parties have been gradually giving less power to delegates, MLAs or MPs to elect their leaders and more to individual party members. But despite seeming “more democratic,” the move has “come at the significant expense of further disempowering… [the] elected MPs whose primary job in Parliament is to hold governments to account.”

“By establishing a direct link between the leader and party members,” Macfarlane writes, “leaders assume an effective mandate not from their caucus [e.g., MPs elected under the same party banner]—people elected by millions of Canadians—but from a relatively tiny proportion of the Canadian population. For example, Justin Trudeau won the Liberal leadership in 2013 with 81,389 member votes. By contrast, 5,556,629 Canadian voters selected Liberal candidates to represent them in Parliament. The democratic legitimacy of the Liberal caucus as a whole far outweighs the democratic legitimacy of the party leader.”

Voters, Macfarlane admits, are often more attuned to leaders than to local candidates. “But when we ignore how our democratic institutions are designed and how our representative democracy is intended to operate, we see why problems like excessive concentration of power in the hands of the prime minister prevail, and why aspects of it have gotten worse.”

The end of independent councillors will embolden Take Back Alberta and empower party donors.

Smith herself has argued as much, writing in 2010 in Policy Options: “MLAs don’t work for their leader or their party; they work for the people of the constituency they represent, and more generally for the people of Alberta.”

But Smith’s creation of municipal parties siphons power away from the people of Edmonton and Calgary. Many local candidates are now beholden to parties, to party leaders and to opaque nomination processes. The shift away from independent civic councillors will empower party insiders and donors. It will embolden organizations such as TBA.

Indeed, all of this seems intentional. The same UCP legislation that enabled municipal parties brought corporate and union donations back into local elections (a change likewise not in the UCP’s 2023 election platform). These kinds of donations were banned from provincial politics by Alberta’s government in 2015, with the unanimous support of all MLAs. The donations were banned from municipal politics in 2018. Wildrose MLA Wayne Anderson that year told the legislature: “It’s important to keep special interests at bay when influencing [municipal] campaigning. The reality is that an individual cannot compete with a large union or corporation when they want the candidate’s ear. Under this legislation, local election candidates will only be able to accept donations from individuals, thus giving individual citizens more of a level playing field.”

Worse, under Smith’s new rules, donors can give to a candidate and to that candidate’s party. This essentially doubles the spending limit for party-aligned council and mayor candidates. “It puts local governments up for sale to the highest bidder,” Alberta Municipalities president Tyler Gandam told reporters. “Local elections will end up being about what influential [donors] want, not about what voters want. Independent candidates risk being outspent and drowned out by party candidates who enjoy the financial backing of corporations and unions. Who stands to benefit?”

In 2021 Jeromy Farkas did a Reddit “Ask Me Anything” (AMA). Farkas, as a councillor, was often seen as a universal naysayer. But in his AMA he said municipal politics produces more agreement than most people realize. “The reality is different from the soundbites,” he wrote. “I may not have agreed with council on issues like corporate welfare, the Olympic bid or the closed-door arena deal, but each time, I had the support of much of my constituency. I had to raise those issues, because that’s what my residents needed me to do. The media rarely portrays that I’ve worked closely with every other member of council to consistently deliver for my constituents—often with people you might think would be unlikely allies, such as councillor [Druh] Farrell and mayor Nenshi.” He gave as examples a city plan to remove lead pipes; support for a tool to help police find high-risk missing children; and funding for summer students.

Farkas lost that mayoral election. In a January 2023 interview with the Calgary Sun, he said it’s already hard for councillors to resist political pressure from parties. “We’re trained by the politicians and by the media that politics is tribal. If you’re on the red team, you have to always support the red team no matter what stupid things they do. The same thing goes for the orange team and the blue team. It’s even worse than that. It’s covering up the bad things your team does and turning a blind eye.”

Today Farkas is again running for mayor. He has chosen—as has Gondek—to run as an independent. Two party-aligned candidates are challenging them both. After Danielle Smith’s government brought in municipal parties, Farkas was asked by the Sprawl for his assessment of the idea. His reply: “Municipal parties at the city level—I think it’s cancer.”

Jonathan Haidt opened the book that Danielle Smith cited in her farewell-to-the-radio column with a quote from Rodney King: “Can we all get along?” King’s 1992 near-fatal beating by Los Angeles police precipitated five days of riots and 63 deaths. Haidt used these words deliberately, he wrote, because today so many people “are asking King’s question not about race relations but about political relations and the collapse of co-operation across party lines. Many Americans feel as though the nightly news from Washington is being sent to us from helicopters circling over the city, delivering dispatches from the war zone.”

Smith, the radio host who just wanted to have lively discussions about controversial ideas, said she endured vitriol and threats from the public and became overwhelmed by “extreme” political polarization. Scholarly research and polling back up her fears about the spread of polarization in Canada. Smith the online libertarian pundit then professed to admire above all other political models the “healthy” freedom from party straitjackets enjoyed by city councillors.

Smith the premier, however, stokes the flames of division.

In early 2025 Smith introduced legislation to make it much easier for Albertans to initiate a separation referendum. She admitted to CTV host Vassy Kapelos that the change was done to benefit her own party. “If there isn’t an outlet [for separatists], it creates a new party,” she said. A separatist splinter group, in other words, could do to Smith what her Wildrose once did to the Progressive Conservatives. Or it could do what TBA did to premier Kenney. It could send Smith back into political exile. Calgary Herald politics columnist Don Braid wrote, “Nobody expected the premier to reveal the raw cynicism behind her changes to referendum rules.”

One concern about polarization that Haidt foresaw is a growing threat of violence against politicians. Alberta isn’t immune to this. Rachel Notley, in her first two years as premier, reportedly received 11 credible death threats. In 2016 alone, 26 cases of “inappropriate contact and communication” involving the premier were sent to police. In 2022 MP Charlie Angus wrote in Policy magazine about federal politicians’ risk. “I can no longer count on my political ‘sixth sense’ when meeting people in public, because the conspiratorial mindset fed by disinformation doesn’t fit into a simple profile of age, class or demographic,” he wrote. “Parliament Hill security is advising elected officials to scope out public events before entering, to be briefed in advance on potential threats, and have an escape plan in case things go wrong.” That year, Canada’s MPs were issued panic buttons.

Haidt recalls that Rodney King, as he stumbled through his TV interview, choking back tears, said, “Please, we can get along here. We all can get along. I mean, we’re all stuck here for a while. Let’s try to work it out.” “This book,” Haidt wrote, “is about why it’s so hard for us to get along. We are indeed all stuck here for a while, so let’s at least do what we can to understand why we are so easily divided into hostile groups, each one certain of its righteousness.”

Political disagreements are a part of life. But we don’t have to further divide ourselves into hostile groups. We don’t have to encourage the worst kind of politics. Danielle Smith knows this. Yet she chose to drag Edmonton’s and Calgary’s municipal councils away from their imperfect independent traditions and into the partisan muck.

Evan Osenton is editor of Alberta Views.

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The Alberta NDP is a political party undergoing a face lift. And the person holding the scalpel is the new leader, Naheed Nenshi.

The transformation began the moment Nenshi entered the race on March 11, 2024, 14 weeks before being declared the winner on June 22.

He flooded the party with tens of thousands of new members and captured more than 62,000 votes, or 86 per cent of the final ballots. Albertans signed up not to support the old New Democratic Party, but to join a “new” New Democratic Party led by a charismatic and nationally known former mayor of Calgary.

Nenshi’s leadership campaign was short on policy specifics but long on energetic promises to defeat Danielle Smith and the UCP in the next provincial election in 2027.

The NDP was becoming the “Nenshi” Democratic Party.

Nenshi doesn’t like that description. In an interview for this column, he said, “the ‘N’ in NDP doesn’t stand for Nenshi any more than it stood for Notley. It’s a party with a huge diversity of views.”

Except that under Notley’s leadership the Alberta NDP was very much the “Notley” Democratic Party, not just because she built the organization from a rump opposition with four seats into government in 2015 and then emerged from the 2023 election loss with the largest official Opposition in Alberta history. Notley was a walking embodiment of traditional NDP values, social and economic.

Nenshi is still finding his sea legs as leader and doesn’t want to trip himself up three years out from an election.

The NDP under Nenshi, however, is a work in progress. That’s because as leader of a political party Nenshi himself is a work in progress. “I’ve never been in opposition,” said Nenshi, who as Calgary mayor from 2010 to 2021 was his own boss. “We’re thinking really hard about how to reach out to Albertans in new ways. You’ll see a lot of that going forward, both for me and for my caucus colleagues.”

He is happy to bash the UCP government as “immoral and dangerous” while offering up the NDP as a “predictable, dependable and rational” government-in-waiting.

It’s all rather vague. But Nenshi insists he has a plan.

He wants to find a balance between attacking the UCP government while also offering up positive alternatives.

He is determined to flesh out a policy on healthcare, for example, by having MLA Luanne Metz, a medical doctor, travel the province speaking with healthcare stakeholders “to develop a really comprehensive blueprint for the future of healthcare in Alberta. So instead of healthcare decisions being made like a pinball machine based on whatever Danielle Smith heard on Tucker Carlson last week, and completely changing things around, we will be going into 2027 with a fully developed, fully costed program for healthcare.”

In other words, wait and see.

That’s pretty much Nenshi’s answer on many fronts.

While taking questions at a Calgary Chamber of Commerce luncheon in September, Nenshi refused to say where he stands on issues like a federal carbon tax, saying he wants to see who wins the next federal election. “My real goal is to hear from all of you about precisely what you mean and what kind of government would make sense for you,” said Nenshi, in the kind of pandering response offered up by politicians trying to avoid the issue.

Nenshi is still finding his sea legs as leader and doesn’t want to trip himself up or box himself into a corner three years out from an election.

For politicians, being something of a mystery has an upside. They are a blank slate on which voters can project their hopes.

Conversely, blank slates are easy to defile. And the UCP has been busy trying to paint the former mayor as a Trudeau ally who botched Calgary’s Green Line LRT project. They want voters to see him as controversial, a risky choice.

But while that will work for the UCP base, it could otherwise be a hard sell. Nenshi is outspoken, skilled and charismatic. He poses a real threat to the UCP. That’s why so many anti-UCP Albertans, particularly those in Calgary, became members. They saw Nenshi as the best bet to take on Smith and defeat her in 2027.

Electing Nenshi as NDP leader was never about maintaining the course set by Rachel Notley. It was never about shoring up the New Democratic Party but about tearing down the UCP.

Nenshi’s followers boarded the NDP ship en masse and made him captain.

He is now promising to lay out a course to take Albertans to a new, better destination.

We have yet to see the map.

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

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“At least people are talking about us,” said one official at the time. “Some might think it’s silly, but I think it’s creative.”

Well, it certainly got people talking about how creatively silly it was—right up until the party re-adopted its old name in 2014. The re-rebranded but still unpopular Alberta Liberal Party then dwindled to one seat in the 2015 election. The name-changing flip-flop did not bring about the Liberal Party’s demise but was a public indication that the party was frantically trying to pull itself out of a death spiral.

But rebranding a political party can sometimes work, as it did for troubled Conservatives who formed the Saskatchewan Party (more on them in a moment).

Alberta’s New Democratic Party certainly doesn’t seem to be teetering on the brink of electoral irrelevance, but nevertheless the party has lately been pushed to change its name. Not shoved, mind you; more like gently nudged. A political organization called Alberta’s Progressive Future, founded in part by former NDP cabinet minister Brian Malkinson, issued a news release last November saying it’s time for the party to consider rebranding itself.

Malkinson argued that Alberta New Democrats need to demonstrate in the starkest possible way that they aren’t puppets of the federal NDP, even though the provincial NDP’s constitution declares the party to be a branch of the national party. Joining the Alberta NDP makes you a member of the federal NDP. This formal affiliation, Malkinson said, turned off enough voters to cost the NDP the 2023 provincial election. Or, put more simply, middle-of-the-road Albertans were turned off by the NDP name because of its affiliation with federal leader Jagmeet Singh, who has, among other things, argued against the expansion of the Trans Mountain pipeline.

Malkinson’s name-changing idea, though, received a lukewarm reception at best from party members. NDP leader Rachel Notley not only outright rejected a rebranding but argued in favour of keeping the joint membership.

Is there a lesson here or a cautionary tale for those arguing in favour of rebranding the Alberta NDP?

However, several candidates in the Alberta NDP’s leadership race to replace Notley have argued in favour of loosening ties with the federal party. In February, for example, Rakhi Pancholi said that when she joined the Alberta NDP in 2018 she was “surprised” to learn she would automatically become a member of the federal party. She went on to argue that “we limit our ability to grow our party” by “forcing” a federal membership on provincial members.

That argument makes sense if hundreds or perhaps thousands of Albertans had refused to join the NDP because they didn’t want to become federal party members. Perhaps more likely, just like Pancholi herself, most Albertans have no idea the two memberships are linked.

Besides, most people don’t even join parties. Most simply decide how they’ll vote during an election campaign. If they have been turned off by the NDP, maybe, again, it was more to do with the party simply sharing a name with an unpopular-in-Alberta federal party than with knowledge of the NDP’s constitution.

That’s not to say Malkinson’s idea for a name change would help. Political parties that have successfully rebranded have done more than simply change their name.

The Saskatchewan Party, for example, came about when four members of the soon-to-be defunct Progressive Conservatives in that province joined forces with four members of the almost-defunct Saskatchewan Liberal Party in 1997 to create a new political creature that went on to win government in 2007.

The formation of Alberta’s United Conservative Party in 2017, for that matter, came from the ashes of the old PCs and Wildrose. Even the federal New Democrats’ brand came not from a simple name change but from the amalgamation of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation and the Canadian Labour Congress in 1961.

The British Columbia Liberal Party, on the other hand, did simply change its name to “BC United” in April 2023 in the hope of distancing itself from the federal Liberals while trying to signal it isn’t the same provincial Liberal Party that was rejected by voters in the 2020 election.

Will it make a difference Closer to home, is there a lesson here or a cautionary tale for those arguing in favour of some form of rebranding—whether by name or constitutional amendment—of the Alberta NDP?

Perhaps the proof will be in the BC-election pudding on October 19.

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

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Through all the twists and turns of pandemic politics and internal conflict in the UCP, the 2023 election has loomed. Can the UCP return Alberta to its “normal” pattern of decades-long conservative dynasties Or will the NDP stage a comeback that signals a new era of two-party competition?

Much is at stake in this election. But who are these parties What are the alternatives they present to Alberta voters?

Capturing the “essence” of a political party is no easy task. Parties are complex organizations. They have foundational commitments—to a set of principles or a segment of society, such as farmers or the working class. Individuals and groups within parties try to shape them to conform with their beliefs. Above all else, parties exist to try to win power, and so their policy stances are often malleable, bending to meet public opinion. Within parties, leaders play an outsized role, and so the selection of a new leader can reshape a party almost overnight.

Both of the main parties facing off in Alberta in 2023 have governed, and so we can look back at what they have done. We can also listen to what they tell us about their core beliefs and the policy commitments they make as they go into the election.

The core commitment of Alberta’s newly united conservatives is to personal freedom and small government.

Alberta is a conservative place. It reliably elects conservatives to Ottawa, and for decades elected a Progressive Conservative provincial government. Just as the populist Reform Party emerged out of Alberta to disrupt federal conservative politics, the Wildrose Party was formed in 2008 and quickly became a thorn in the side of the province’s governing PCs, channelling the discontent of populist, socially conservative and libertarian supporters. This competition on the right contributed to an outcome that shook Alberta conservatives to their core: the election in 2015 of Rachel Notley’s NDP.

The UCP was formed in 2017 through the merger of these two right-wing parties. Its raison d’être was to win power, restoring Alberta conservatives to what they see as their rightful place in government.

But even with this overarching purpose the party struggled to bring together the strands of Alberta conservatism. Under Peter Lougheed the PCs had been a centrist party, building up the Alberta state not only to develop the oil sands but also to invest resource revenues to build a diversified future economy. In contrast, Wildrose was firmly grounded in Alberta populism. It was fiscally conservative and advocated for more choice in how people receive services such as K–12 education and healthcare.

In the merger of the parties not much of the Lougheed legacy survived. The core commitment of the newly united conservatives is to the ideas of personal freedom and small government. The party is friendly to business in general and to oil and gas in particular. It sees its core commitments as fundamentally Albertan, and so it seeks to insulate the province from a federal government it perceives to be a threat to the province’s prosperity.

Freedom figures prominently in the party’s founding principles, which assert a vision of society “made up of free individuals” and commit the party to “economic freedom,” “free enterprise” and “freedom of speech, worship and assembly.”

The COVID-19 pandemic posed a fundamental challenge to a government supposedly committed to unfettered personal freedom. The Kenney government reluctantly imposed limits on personal freedoms to stop the spread of the virus. Restrictions on gatherings and mask and vaccination mandates so offended many party members and MLAs that Kenney’s leadership was thrown into question.

Under Danielle Smith, freedom has been reinforced as a—if not the—foundational value of the party, and the Kenney government’s COVID response has been thoroughly repudiated.

Along with “freedom,” smaller government is a foundational commitment for the UCP. Grounded in a belief in the efficiency of the market, party members prefer a smaller public sector and a bigger role for the private sector in the delivery of services. The party’s founding principles articulate this, making reference to “economic freedom in a market economy,” “limited government, including low levels of taxation” and “fiscal responsibility, including balanced budgets, debt reduction and respect for taxpayers’ money.”

In its first year, the Kenney government was guided by this desire to make government smaller, commissioning the MacKinnon Report to show that the province spent more per capita on education and healthcare than other Canadian jurisdictions. Its first budgets reduced corporate income tax rates and promised “to find more cost-effective ways (including private–public partnerships) to deliver services.” Pursuing cost efficiency, the government legislated to postpone arbitration for public-sector collective agreements, told arbitrators to impose wage cuts of 2 per cent or more, and privatized laundry, cleaning and food services in healthcare, laying off an estimated 11,000 workers all told in the public sector.

The desire for smaller government translated into significant cuts to public funding for post-secondary education. Operating grants were reduced across the sector. The largest cuts were to the University of Alberta’s grant, which was reduced by 33 per cent. Other institutions saw sizeable cuts, such as the University of Lethbridge, at 21 per cent between 2019 and 2022–2023. At the same time, the government permitted institutions to raise tuition by 7 per cent each year. After four years the result is Alberta’s post-secondary institutions rely less on public funding and more on individual students to cover costs.

In K–12 education, the UCP’s new funding model for school boards was intended to reduce costs, even as funding lagged (and still lags) behind growth in student numbers. Significant cuts to funding for children with disabilities added additional strain to school board budgets. These cuts have been partially reversed, and some funds have gone to boards to address pandemic learning loss and concerns about students’ mental health. Despite its preference for smaller government, the UCP’s 2023 budget included significant increases in funding for K–12 education and healthcare. But, overall, per-student funding for K–12 education has shrunk. The UCP government also gave money to support the opening of new charter schools, which receive public funding but operate outside public school boards and aren’t obligated to accept all students.

When it signed an agreement with the federal government to expand public supports for childcare, the Kenney government accepted both a shift toward non-profit delivery of childcare and a greater public role in subsidizing childcare. That said, the agreement allowed for a more significant role for the private sector to deliver childcare in Alberta than in most other provinces’ agreements. The Smith government has emphasized the importance of private operators as it has worked to implement the agreement.

The preference for private over public ownership also drove the UCP’s approach to affordable housing: the party released a plan to divest the province of ownership of affordable housing assets over a 10-year period. And although she has not yet acted on them, Smith has in the past praised the potential use of market mechanisms to control costs and improve accountability in the delivery of public services, using schemes such as vouchers and health spending accounts. The government has also entered into agreements to increase the number of publicly funded surgeries done by private providers in the province.

The NDP platform marries support for oil and gas with moderate environmental policy and progressive social policy.

With its commitment to “jobs, economy, pipelines” the Kenney government continued a Conservative government tradition of defining Alberta’s prosperity as synonymous with oil and gas. To fight back against a global movement away from fossil fuels, Kenney created an energy “war room,” launched an inquiry into alleged foreign actors targeting the oil sands and spent $1.3-billion to try to keep the Keystone XL pipeline project viable, only to see it cancelled by the Biden administration.

Under Smith, the UCP remains determined to ensure growth of the oil and gas sector, gearing up for conflict with Ottawa over a proposed emissions cap on oil sands production. An early skirmish in this conflict flared in January 2023, when Smith went on the offensive against the federal government’s planned “just transition” legislation, intended to help workers transition to a low-carbon economy.

There is, of course, a long and rich history of conflict between Alberta’s government and its federal counterpart. The UCP has cultivated an ideology of “Albertanism” that asserts the superiority of Alberta’s approach to governance, a keenness to exploit natural resources and a commitment to “conservative values.” These stand in contrast to—in the UCP’s estimation—an exploitative federal government unable to deliver on its core commitments and intent on pandering to Quebec.

Under Kenney, the focus of Albertanism was on the federal equalization system, understood to take money from virtuous Albertans to subsidize indolent Quebeckers. The Kenney government held a referendum in 2021 asking Albertans whether they favoured a change to Canada’s constitution to remove the commitment to equalization. It also appointed the Fair Deal panel, which recommended the creation of an Alberta police force to replace the RCMP, a provincial pension plan to replace the CPP, and a provincial tax collection agency.

A commitment to “Albertanism” grew even fiercer under Smith. Her government passed her signature Alberta Sovereignty within a United Canada Act, which claims to allow the province to not enforce federal laws. It directed provincial Crown prosecutors not to act on some Criminal Code provisions relating to guns. And Smith kept proposals for provincial police, pensions and tax collection alive, even as she delayed implementation until after an election.

The Alberta NDP’s constitution says the party’s purpose is “to promote the principles of democratic socialism in Alberta and to establish and maintain a democratic socialist government in Alberta through the electoral process.” Many different definitions of democratic socialism exist, ranging from old-school calls for public ownership of the “means of production” to more moderate commitments to equal opportunity and a role for government in regulating the economy. The NDP under Rachel Notley is certainly at the moderate end of any spectrum of democratic socialist thought. Many on the Alberta left even question whether the party can be called “socialist” in any meaningful way.

As the 2023 election approaches, the party has developed a platform that marries support for oil and gas with moderate environmental policy and progressive social policy. Its main focus is on affordability, healthcare and economic development.

Notley’s NDP is firmly ensconced in the moderate and pragmatic approach embraced by the NDP in Saskatchewan and Manitoba. After forming government in Alberta in 2015, the party raised corporate taxes modestly and reintroduced progressive income tax rates, ending the flat tax the Klein government had implemented. Like conservative governments before and after it, the NDP did not bring in a provincial sales tax. Its 2023 fiscal plan commits the party to limiting the use of non-renewable resource revenues to cover operating expenses and imposes a debt ceiling.

In government, and in its policies leading into the 2023 election, the Alberta NDP remains committed to the extraction of fossil fuels. This support is balanced against a concern for the environment. In government, the party worked with industry to develop a climate plan that put a price on greenhouse gas emissions, phased out coal-generated electricity and capped oil sands emissions. But Notley remained a strong proponent of the industry, working to build a coalition to get the Trans Mountain Pipeline expansion built, buying rail cars to get oil to market and declining to raise provincial royalty rates.

Although centrist in orientation, the NDP remains firmly committed to public delivery of core responsibilities of the provincial government, including healthcare, education and affordable housing. The party is highly critical of the UCP’s efforts to privatize delivery of healthcare, including opposing the contracting out of services that employ unionized workers in the public sector.

When it was in government, the NDP froze post-secondary tuition and kept funding to institutions largely stable. Its commitment prior to the 2023 election was to increase funding to institutions, abolish the performance-based funding model, improve student aid and cap tuition to inflation. Its platform commitments include significant public investments in affordable housing, public education and healthcare.

The NDP is also inclined toward the use of the government’s regulatory authority, whether to limit auto-insurance rate increases or to raise minimum wages.

A central commitment for the party is social equality, both in terms of economic equity but also with reference to systemic discrimination based in gender, race or other characteristics. Its “Alberta’s Future” website declares that the NDP has “a vision for an economy that works for everyone, not just the rich” and features “equality and inclusion” as a key principle. In government, the NDP appointed the province’s first minister responsible for the status of women and enacted legislation protecting gay–straight alliances in schools. In opposition, the party introduced legislation (which the UCP majority government did not pass) to require collection of race-based data and establish an anti-racism office within government.

If Danielle Smith had her way, the question in the minds of voters as they go to the polls would be “Who do you think will stand up for Alberta against Justin Trudeau?” Under Kenney’s leadership, the UCP adopted a dual strategy of confrontation with Ottawa and fortification of Alberta by asserting autonomy where the constitution allowed. Smith has continued this dual strategy, dialing up the rhetoric of confrontation and, with her Alberta Sovereignty Act, pushing fortification beyond what the constitution permits.

The strategy has involved legal challenges to federal government actions, including the carbon tax, the Impact Assessment Act, the use of the Emergencies Act and the ban on single-use plastics. The provincial referendum in fall of 2021 asking whether Albertans wanted the principle of equalization removed from the constitution was another element of confrontation. Smith characterizes her Sovereignty Act as a type of confrontation.

The second strategy, fortification of Alberta, was endorsed by Kenney’s “Fair Deal” panel. Recommendations (replace the RCMP; replace CPP; create a provincial revenue collection agency) now appear to have become official party policy, with all of them included in the mandate letters Smith sent in November 2022 to members of her cabinet.

The NDP’s approach to relations with Ottawa will involve neither confrontation nor fortification. As premier, Notley occasionally engaged in confrontational tactics (including a standoff with BC premier John Horgan over bitumen transport, which briefly saw Alberta ban BC wines), but overall she sought co-operation. She points to the federal government’s purchase of the TMX pipeline as evidence of the success of her approach. Her party has opposed the UCP’s proposals to fortify provincial autonomy through policing, pensions and tax collection, and is vehemently opposed to what it calls the “job-killing” Sovereignty Act.

If the UCP wants voters to be thinking about who is best equipped to “stand up to Ottawa,” the NDP wants voters to be asking which party is best equipped to repair the healthcare system. In March Notley released her party’s “plan for modernizing primary care” by creating family health teams, followed by a commitment to provide free prescription contraception. The previous fall Notley had introduced a private member’s bill that would have established standards for healthcare delivery and increased transparency around wait times. The NDP is firmly committed to public delivery of healthcare and has criticized the UCP government for expanding the role of private service providers, its ongoing conflict with healthcare workers, its underfunding of services and its handling of the pandemic.

In its first year in government, the UCP tried to reduce healthcare costs by unilaterally breaking its contract with doctors and keeping other workers’ compensation flat. It was committed to moving toward private delivery of publicly funded surgeries, and has made some progress on that front.

But COVID-19 threw the healthcare system into crisis. Through most of the pandemic, Alberta had the most liberal approach of any province to pandemic restrictions, placing considerable pressure on the health system. The UCP blamed Alberta Health Services for these poor outcomes, with the Kenney government removing AHS CEO Verna Yiu, and the Smith government firing the Kenney-appointed AHS board of directors and replacing Chief Medical Officer of Health Deena Hinshaw. As a candidate for the UCP leadership, Smith called for an amnesty for people charged with violating COVID-19 restrictions; in office she has been embroiled in controversy over her alleged efforts to influence the prosecution of Artur Pawlowski related to his actions at the Coutts border blockade.

Before taking office, Smith mused publicly about introducing health-spending accounts and requiring Albertans to pay for primary care. Faced with an ongoing crisis in acute care, her government made changes to EMS, directing some ambulance rides to be replaced by taxis and redirecting some 911 calls to Health Link, among other reforms aimed at reducing pressure on emergency rooms.

Voters will choose between two parties with very different visions for the future of Alberta.

Both parties agree that oil and gas will remain an important part of the province’s economy for some time. With its energy war room and vocal opposition to environmental initiatives from Ottawa, the UCP has been the louder advocate. During the 2022 UCP leadership race Smith said she believes the industry can reach net zero by 2050, but she was roundly criticized by other conservative candidates and hasn’t repeated the claim since. In its 2022 throne speech, her government committed to provide “continued leadership in hydrogen and petrochemicals and development in helium, lithium, liquefied natural gas, geothermal energy and minerals.” Her stance on the federal government’s “just transition” legislation insists that any federal action should “incentivize investment and job growth in both the conventional energy sector as well as in emerging industries.”

The Smith government’s commitment to the industry extended to a pilot project offering companies money to clean up old wells—a departure from the “polluter-pay” approach the province has long taken. In March 2023 the NDP introduced a motion in the legislature endorsing the polluter-pay principle but it was defeated by UCP MLAs.

As the election neared, the NDP released policy documents indicating ongoing support for the oil sands (“bitumen beyond combustion”), further development of the petrochemical industry and cutting regulations through a “fast pass” for companies with strong records of compliance with environmental regulations. Other documents show interest in developing alternative energy, including hydrogen, geothermal and renewables.

The Kenney government sparked controversy when it repealed a 1976 coal policy that protected the eastern slopes of the Rockies from coal development. The NDP strongly opposed that move. The UCP government eventually reversed course.

Both parties recognize that inflation has created significant financial strain for many Albertans. The UCP has approached the issue with a combination of tax breaks and direct payments to Albertans. These include suspensions to the provincial fuel tax, rebates to electricity and natural gas consumers, the indexation of personal income taxes and cheques of $600 to most seniors and parents.

The UCP acted on many of the NDP’s proposals in this area, including indexing income tax brackets and social assistance payments such as the Assured Income for the Severely Handicapped (AISH), which payments the Kenney government had frozen four years previously. The NDP called on the government to take action to regulate costs, particularly for auto insurance, and the Smith government acted on this early in 2023. The NDP also criticized the UCP’s decision to remove the Notley-era cap on electricity rates for consumers.

In four years in government, the UCP did little to signal support for equity-deserving groups. It didn’t maintain a stand-alone ministry responsible for the status of women, having demoted the portfolio to a parliamentary secretary. The party also eliminated a human rights education and multiculturalism fund in 2019. The Kenney government’s proposed changes to the provincial social studies curriculum (which they eventually postponed) were criticized as Eurocentric and ignoring Indigenous perspectives.

The NDP has been consistently critical of the UCP on a range of issues relating to equity and inclusion, from the failure to consult Indigenous leaders before moving ahead with the Sovereignty Act to the refusal to consider legislation requiring collection of race-based data. The party’s policy statements are attentive to issues of inclusion; for instance, the policy statement on childcare talks about public support for services as a way to encourage women’s participation in the paid workforce.

When voters go to the polls at the end of May, they will choose between two parties with very different visions for the future of the province. One emphasizes freedom, limited government and conflict with Ottawa. The other highlights equality, public delivery of services and a reduction of hostilities with the federal government. On election day, one way or another, voters will set the direction of the province for years to come.

Lisa Young is a professor of political science at the U of C.

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Part 1: Following the populist playbook

Danielle Smith rode a wave of Alberta populism to win the United Conservative Party leadership on the sixth ballot. She is a new and potentially disruptive force in Canadian politics. “No longer will Alberta ask permission from Ottawa to be prosperous and free,” Smith said in her acceptance speech October 6. “We will not have our voices silenced and censored. We will not be told what we must put in our bodies in order to work or to travel. We will not have our resources landlocked or our energy phased out of existence by virtue-signalling prime ministers.”

Alberta politics includes a long tradition of populism: a belief that ordinary people are being kept down by an elite. That elite might be the federal government, global environmental activists, scientists or eastern Canadians. Populist leaders often rise to power by offering simplistic but grand plans, like Donald Trump’s promise to “build a wall” along the border with Mexico.

Smith’s win in the UCP leadership race follows the populist playbook. She positioned herself as an outsider, sided with the protesters angry about COVID-19 restrictions and vaccine mandates and promised she would put “Alberta First” and fight Ottawa with her Sovereignty Act.

The UCP leadership race was primed for a populist to win.

The party’s membership is predominantly located outside Calgary and Edmonton. Unlike many other parties’ rules for electing a leader, there was no weighting of votes by electoral district to ensure the new leader has support from across the province. Each vote was counted equally. Anti-establishment populist sentiment is strong in rural Alberta.

Being seen as an outsider is important for politicians who want to ride a populist wave into office. Only an outsider is able to make credible claims they will sweep away the elite. Smith was the only candidate for UCP leader without a seat in the legislature; many served in former premier Jason Kenney’s cabinet. For party members angry at the Kenney government, her claim to be an outsider was an asset.

Smith is not new to Alberta politics, though. She was leader of the Wildrose party, losing an election in 2012 and then crossing the floor to the government in 2014, ending that chapter of her political career. She then spent six years as a radio talk show host.

During the pandemic, Smith criticized COVID-19 restrictions and vaccine mandates; her views played a role in her departure from her radio job. In her statement when she left, she said she was “gravely troubled by how easily most in our society have chosen to give up on freedom.”

Alberta stands out in Canada for its relatively low public support for public health measures and negative assessment of the province’s pandemic response. As protests over COVID-19 mandates turned into the so-called freedom convoy, UCP supporters were more likely than other Albertans to approve of that protest movement. Smith was able to mobilize support from Albertans angry about public health restrictions. One of her earliest campaign videos stated: “What happened over the last two years must never happen again… Let me be clear: As your premier, our province will never lock down again.”

While the backlash over COVID-19 restrictions gave Smith momentum to launch her leadership bid, her Alberta First stance solidified her as the leading candidate in the race.

The movement that fuels support for the Sovereignty Act isn’t your grandpa’s Alberta alienation.

There is a widespread belief among Albertans that the province is not treated fairly or given the respect it deserves. Although a minority of about 20 per cent, separatists are a persistent force in Alberta politics.

Many UCP supporters have been frustrated that Kenney’s efforts to eliminate the federal carbon tax, renegotiate the equalization formula and build pipelines to tidewater have not been successful. Smith’s strategy was to adopt a more radical stance on Alberta’s place in Confederation. The centrepiece of her Alberta First platform is her proposed Alberta Sovereignty Act, which she has promised will be her first priority as premier.

The Sovereignty Act was first proposed as part of the Free Alberta Strategy. The document argues that Canada has “expropriated” Alberta’s wealth for decades and has “breached its constitutional agreement with Alberta.” It advocates for the Alberta legislature to grant itself the power to refuse to enforce federal legislation or judicial decisions that, in its view, interfere with provincial jurisdiction or attack the interests of Albertans.

Most of the other candidates for the UCP leadership, Kenney, and constitutional experts have criticized the proposal as blatantly unconstitutional and destabilizing to investment in the province. Despite these criticisms, the proposal is popular with Smith’s supporters.

Smith is a potentially disruptive force in Canadian politics. She has to hold together a divided caucus, satisfy her supporters and position her party for a provincial election in spring 2023. If she’s able to unite her caucus to pass the Sovereignty Act, the courts will almost certainly strike it down as unconstitutional, leaving Smith fighting against the Canadian constitutional order during the provincial election.

It remains to be seen whether Smith’s time in office will be a brief interlude, or the start of a significant challenge to national unity.

On October 6, 2022, Danielle Smith ultimately edged past Travis Toews, with 53.77 per cent of the 84,593 ballots cast by UCP members. She won the leadership of the UCP party, and by default, the premiership of the province. (Will Geier for Alberta Views)

Part 2: Origins of the Sovereignty Act

Alberta alienation has been around more or less since the province was formed in 1905. Agrarian populism has morphed into extractive populism; anger about the federally regulated banks has morphed into anger about equalization; rejection of the central Canadian narrative of the country has been a constant. While there is much continuity in the presence and expression of Alberta’s alienation, the movement that fuels support for the Sovereignty Act isn’t your grandpa’s Alberta alienation.

What has developed over the past three decades is an overt effort to cultivate a regional identity grounded in a shared political ideology. What is distinctive about Alberta, in this view, is its conservatism. And when Canada rejects conservatism, it rejects Alberta. And this conservatism can’t be disentangled from the oil industry.

Until relatively recently, the core impulse of alienated Albertans was to fix Canada, either by making it more responsive to western concerns (by establishing new political parties or suggesting institutional reform like a triple-E Senate) or by installing a Conservative government in Ottawa. We can think of this as the reformist impulse.

But the Firewall Letter marked the start of a different impulse: to retreat into Alberta as a conservative homeland. Written just after Jean Chrétien’s second re-election, it called for an Alberta pension plan, tax collection agency and provincial police force, as well as an assertion of provincial authority over healthcare and a provincial referendum to force Senate reform back onto the provincial agenda.

What was the goal of the firewall To keep tax dollars in Alberta, so that “only our imagination will limit the prospects for extending the reform agenda that [the Klein] government undertook eight years ago. … lower taxes will unleash the energies of the private sector, [and] easing conditions for charter schools will help individual freedom and improve public education….”

After the re-election of the Trudeau government in 2019, Alberta alienation flared again. The Kenney government appointed the Fair Deal panel, which issued a report reprising the Firewall Letter recommendations, substituting a referendum on equalization for the referendum on Senate reform. A group of MPs penned the Buffalo Declaration, prominent Albertans (including Danielle Smith) took part in a conference hosted by Alberta Proud, focused on the question “Does Alberta have viable options and a credible case to go it alone if necessary?” and two lawyers and a political theorist got together to write the Free Alberta Strategy, with a proposed Alberta Sovereignty Act as its centrepiece.

To understand the impulse to retreat, it’s important to remember that most Albertans—including the Firewall authors—don’t really want to retreat from Canada. They’re frustrated reformers: they want to fix Canada, but Canada keeps resisting. And so, the policy suggestions they make stay within the constitution and probably hurt Alberta more than they hurt the rest of Canada. (If Alberta pulls out of the Canada pension plan, or replaces the RCMP, would the rest of Canada notice or care?)

The Free Alberta Strategy (FAS) ups the ante. And the difference is that the FAS authors might not be nearly as committed to remaining in Canada as the Firewall Letter writers were. I don’t know where the two lawyers—Rob Anderson and Derek From—stand on the question of Alberta’s separation. But the political theorist—Barry Cooper—is pretty clear in his views. Writing for the American Law and Liberty website, he says, “The position of the American Patriots in the Thirteen Colonies in 1776 is the position of many Alberta Patriots today.”

The justification for the FAS is familiar, if articulated in a new way. Alberta has been “economically terrorized” by the government of Canada, through, first, the equalization system and other transfers, and second, the deliberate strategy to phase out oil and gas. It goes on to argue that provinces are “voluntary” members of Confederation, “predicated upon the federal government abiding by its constitutional commitments to its members.” [Some constitutional scholars may disagree with this interpretation…]. The federal government, the strategy claims, has “relentlessly intruded” on provincial jurisdiction. And how has it done this “They have used their own appointed and controlled federal courts to give these intrusions legal legitimacy.” So, never mind rule of law, because the courts are compromised.

The Sovereignty Act, as it’s described in the strategy document “would provide Alberta’s Legislature with the authority to refuse enforcement of any specific Act of Parliament or federal court ruling that Alberta’s elected body deemed to be a federal intrusion into an area of provincial jurisdiction, or unfairly prejudicial to the interests of Albertans.” The document goes deep into the need for a provincial police force that could be directed to not enforce offending federal legislation, a banking act that would try to push Albertans into provincially regulated financial institutions to avoid enforcement of orders through the federal Bank Act, and a tax collection agency that would collect Albertans’ federal taxes owing but not send them on to Ottawa. In other words, the full strategy would ensure that all Albertans were in violation of federal laws, but under the protection of the provincial government.

The concluding paragraph claims that “in the end, the federal government will have to negotiate if they want to resolve the situation”—in other words, this would be a hostage-taking, and we’re all sitting on the floor of the bank with our wrists tied together.

To be perfectly clear, what Smith is proposing does not endorse this whole scheme. The version she offered on her campaign website was this: “to refuse provincial enforcement of specific federal laws or policies that violate the jurisdictional rights of Alberta under sections 92–95 of the Constitution or that breaches the Charter rights of Albertans.” Since Smith was elected party leader, the proposal has morphed again, this time to respect the rule of law and Supreme Court decisions.

How should we situate the Sovereignty Act proposal in the narrative of Alberta alienation Clearly, it is less reformist than it is retreatist. It comes short of pulling Alberta out of confederation but imagines Alberta enjoying some kind of Confederation Lite: only as much part of Canada as it feels like.

But we have to recall that underlying all the retreatist proposals is a reformist idea: if only the rest of Canada takes Alberta’s alienation seriously, Canada will reform itself, and things will be better.

The proposal is entirely consistent with the idea of Alberta as a conservative homeland. The fall announcement that Alberta would try to avoid having the federal firearms buyback program enforced in the province was a perfect illustration, trying to set the province up as a haven for those who value “property rights” over public safety.

Like last fall’s equalization referendum, it falls into the category of what I’ve called fantasy federalism, proposals informed by wishful thinking rather than sound constitutional analysis, designed to excite conservative supporters, but with no realistic chance of achieving their intended objectives.

Where the Sovereignty Act as proposed by Smith during the campaign diverges from the other proposals is in its blatant unconstitutionality. The Firewall Letter writers were careful to colour inside the constitutional lines. The equalization referendum was fantasy, but it didn’t try to give the legislature the power to overrule courts. The Sovereignty Act, as Barry Cooper pointed out in an op-ed in the National Post, is unconstitutional on purpose.

There are two reasons we have seen this escalation from constitutional to unconstitutional proposal. The first is that, as some observers predicted, the equalization referendum and other “stand up to Ottawa” activities of the Kenney government promised a lot and delivered little. As you might expect, this was frustrating for Albertans alienated from the federal government. The Sovereignty Act promises to up the ante by taking actions the federal government can’t ignore.

We are in a new, and frankly terrifying, era. People are free to find the facts they want and act on them.

The second reason is that we are in a new, and frankly terrifying, era. People are free to find the facts they want and act on them. In my reality, the Accountability Act is unconstitutional and COVID-19 vaccines are effective. In Danielle Smith’s reality, the Accountability Act is perfectly constitutional and COVID-19 vaccines are largely unnecessary except for the elderly. Trust in mainstream media, experts and institutions is in freefall, particularly among those who have fallen prey to misinformation and disinformation. Norms are passé. The sovereign citizen movement—folks who think that laws just don’t apply to them—is in ascendance, and active in the Freedom Convoy.

At this point it’s tempting to catastrophize. On one hand, I take some comfort in the moderating effect of parliamentary government. On her first day as premier, Smith signalled that her Sovereignty Act would not violate the rule of law. This is a compromise she had to strike to hold her caucus together.

On the other hand, once you have violated a norm, or even publicly contemplated violating a norm, the window of “what is acceptable” shifts. We need only look south of the border to see how quickly norms erode and place democracy in danger. The top takeaway from the Trump years is that the rule of law is essential to democracy. And so, any deliberate effort to erode it is highly problematic.

Lisa Young is a professor in the department of political science at the University of Calgary. This article was originally published  at The Conversation, Oct 6, 2022 (Part 1) and at What Now?! An Alberta Politics Newsletter, Oct 3, 2022 (Part 2).

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“One of you just has to do it first,” says Jennifer Burgess.

“That’s right,” says Allard.

It’s May 5, 2022, five days out from the NDP nomination vote in Calgary-Glenmore. Burgess is a communications professional and a party activist—an NDP member for 14 years, press secretary for two ministries in the NDP government and president of the Calgary-Glenmore NDP constituency association before seeking the nomination. Allard is her campaign manager. They’re door knocking for the undecided vote in the community of Lakeview, an established neighbourhood near the Glenmore reservoir with older bungalows, townhome complexes and upscale infill homes. The undecided—NDP members who previously told doorknockers that they don’t yet know if they’ll vote for Burgess or Nagwan Al-Guneid to be the party’s candidate in the riding—are sparse. Dark clouds threaten rain in the early evening sky, and they walk fast, both wearing comfortable urban hiking shoes—his grey, hers black.

“Unquestionably, the next election will be determined by who can win the most seats in Calgary,” wrote Leah Ward, the Alberta NDP’s former director of communications, in a CBC op-ed in 2022, “with Edmonton a lock for the NDP and the rest of Alberta tilted in the UCP’s favour.” Calgary-Glenmore—one of 26 provincial constituencies in the city—is a key riding to watch for many pundits, not least because it’s been a kind of litmus test for Alberta politics in recent elections. In 2009 the Wildrose Party won a by-election in Calgary-Glenmore, signalling the party’s rise. In 2015 the NDP won the riding by six votes, showcasing the party’s slim margin for error. In 2019 the UCP’s nomination race debate in the riding foreshadowed the party’s landslide win—the community hall so crowded that UCP members had to stand outside, listening through the open front door to five candidates rail against the carbon tax, “socialism,” Justin Trudeau and other popular enemies, while inside the hall it was shoulder-to-shoulder standing room only, the air so hot that sweat dripped in my eyes.

Finding one person to run for the NDP used to be an accomplishment. In 2022, with polls projecting an NDP majority win, the dynamic changed.

Recalling that nomination race in the Legislature in 2021, Calgary-Glenmore MLA Whitney Issik mocked the NDP, saying, “They don’t actually understand nominations very well because they don’t really have them themselves.” Contested nominations were unusual for the NDP—in  2019 they largely ran a slate of incumbent MLAs, and nomination races were rare before then. Often, just finding one person willing to run for the NDP in a constituency outside Edmonton was an accomplishment. In 2015 students, pizza waitresses and other political neophytes were acclaimed as NDP candidates. But in 2022, with polls at the start of the year projecting an NDP majority win over an unpopular Jason Kenney, the dynamic changed.

“I’ve been watching your videos,” says Joan, an older woman who opened her door when Burgess rang the bell at her home. “I’ve been watching both of you [Burgess and Al-Guneid].”

“I appreciate that,” says Burgess. “It’s exciting for Glenmore. As you probably saw, I’m the candidate that lives here [in the riding]. I’ve been doing the work here for a few years, with a team of amazing folks who are ready to go and beat Kenney. Any questions I can answer?”

“No, I don’t think so,” says Joan. “I’ve been following. I will vote.”

“Perfect. That’s the important part,” says Burgess. She says goodbye. The door closes. It’s after 7 p.m. and near puck drop on a Calgary Flames playoff game. “We do not want to be knocking on doors when the hockey game is on,” says Allard. “That’s a good way to lose a vote.” They pull out their phones and plan the next day of the campaign.

The math is the easy part. Alberta has 87 constituencies. To form a majority government a party must win at least 44 of them. In 2019 the UCP won 63 seats and the NDP 24. “We need 20 more seats,” said Shannon Phillips, Lethbridge-West MLA (NDP), in conversation in 2020. “Where are they Who are they?”

Hello, Calgary. In 2019 the NDP won three of the city’s 26 seats. That’s down from the 15 they won in 2015, when the PCs and the Wildrose split the right and the NDP squeaked out victories with vote totals as low as 29.9 per cent in some Calgary ridings.

The hard question for the NDP is how to again win at least 15 and probably more seats in Calgary in a head-to-head battle with one conservative party instead of two.

After the NDP’s defeat in 2019, the wag’s analysis held that the problem for the NDP in Alberta is not that the party’s power base is in Edmonton; the problem is that too many of the party’s Edmonton-based senior political staffers and operatives think that if you just dig down deep enough in Calgary, you’ll find Edmonton.

The two cities do have similarities—both are among the most sprawling cities in Canada, with a few high-density neighbourhoods near downtown but relatively low population density overall and a high reliance on cars. Edmonton, however, elected a progressive (Liberal or NDP) majority in the city in seven of the last 10 provincial elections. Calgary gave conservative parties a large majority in nine of those 10. The cities have distinct political cultures. So, implies the wag’s critique, what works in Edmonton is not the same as what will inspire voters in Calgary.

“I think we do have to be clear about what the jobs and economy vision looks like,” said party stalwart Phillips, back in 2020, musing about how the NDP could again form government. “I don’t believe the majority of people in Calgary aren’t open to a progressive approach. But I do believe the party cannot be doctrinaire about it…. We can’t, as a party, be afraid of any of those things that people in Calgary want to talk about or want to hear.”

Photo republished with the express permission of: Calgary Herald, a division of Postmedia Network Inc.

Arguably, in 2021 almost everyone from across the political spectrum in Alberta wanted to talk about the same things: COVID-19 and Jason Kenney. The virus prowled Alberta, even as mandated protections against the pandemic met with stiff resistance in parts of the province. At the same time, the UCP slashed funding to public services, provoked disputes with doctors, nurses and municipalities and introduced a widely panned, learn-by-rote curriculum containing obvious absurdities (for kindergarten: find gravity on a globe). Kenney’s approval ratings sank as Rachel Notley’s party surged in the polls. The NDP raised five times more money than the UCP in 2021.

On October 24, 2021, poll aggregator 338 projected that the NDP would win 60 seats, including 23 in Calgary. The party began to attract nomination candidates in the city, as political blogger Dave Cournoyer framed it, “with impressive resumés who could presumably become cabinet ministers on Day 1 of a new Notley government.” Luanne Metz, the former head of neurology at the University of Calgary was acclaimed as the NDP candidate in Calgary-Varsity. Marilyn North Peigan, a Canadian Forces veteran, former VP of the Calgary Police Commission and a member of the Blackfoot Confederacy, won a contested nomination against two other candidates in Calgary-Klein. Rosman Valencia, a teacher and activist for the Filipino and LGBTQ communities, was acclaimed in Calgary-East. Energy analyst Samir Kayande was acclaimed in Calgary-Elbow (after Janet Eremenko, the constituency association president and 2019 candidate in the riding, jumped to and won a nomination race in Calgary-Currie).

“We’re working on building a really strong team of candidates… and a campaign that’s very much focused on this city,” said party secretary Brandon Stevens, in an interview in Calgary. Attracting new candidates is “partially grassroots” work and also the work of political staff “reaching out to people that have credentials that resonate with Calgarians,” he said. “We have more staff than we’ve ever had in Calgary, and we [senior NDP political staff in Edmonton] are coming down all the time. Getting to know Highway 2 again.”

The party leader has final approval of candidates, traditionally the purview of the constituency association.

In February 2022 Druh Farrell, a Calgary city councillor for 20 years before retiring in 2021, announced she would seek the NDP nomination in Calgary-Bow. Farrell was a “star” candidate, the highest-profile recruit for the party, and she brought a wealth of experience in government. But not everyone was impressed by how she became a nominee. Calgary-Bow constituency association president Krista Li, a public education advocate with a Ph.D. in history, resigned. She detailed her concerns in a long letter, initially sent privately to Stevens and party president Peggy Wright. Months later Li released it publicly. Her concerns were many: The constituency association—a volunteer-run organization established by a political party to support its political activities in a riding—only learned Farrell was a nominee via Twitter. The party had held Li’s own nominee application for 11 months without giving her a yes or no answer. Constituency associations, “the backbone of this party… that fundraise, staff constituency offices, arrange volunteers and build the party infrastructure to keep MLAs elected,” were ignored and derided. Li’s call to Garett Spelliscy, the party staffer overseeing nominations, was “the most incendiary and abusive phone call I have ever been a part of.”

In closing, she wrote, “I’m not the first president in Calgary to express these concerns—only the latest. Treat volunteers with respect. Deal with applicants in a timely manner. And above all else refuse to employ abusive and misogynistic staffers…. The upcoming election is the NDP’s to lose. Continuing down this path without learning would be decidedly unwise.”

Legally, political parties in Canada are private, not-for-profit organizations that “provide a public good” by offering policy platforms from which citizens can choose. Structurally, the federal and provincial parties operate on a “franchise model.” That’s the academic consensus reported by contributors to Inside the Local Campaign, a book on constituency elections. “Like a business franchise,” they write, “the party is largely responsible for determining policy positions, brand development, communications and campaign direction. The local level is primarily in charge of selecting candidates and providing logistical support in an election.” At the same time, the party leader has final approval of party candidates, and “there is clear interest and even a degree of control exerted [by the central party] in local nomination races, traditionally the purview of the constituency association”—a dynamic that can result in “tension between grassroots members and the central party.”

Both of Alberta’s main parties have felt that tension. In November 2021, 22 UCP constituency associations voted for an early leadership review of Premier Kenney—a vote that was eventually held, with the results of UCP member mail-in voting announced in May. Ahead of that vote, long-time Calgary conservative activist Al Browne told Calgary Herald columnist Don Braid that he talked “to many riding presidents from southern Alberta to northern Alberta” and they were all “supportive of the UCP. But are they dissatisfied with certain actions [of Kenney and his political staffers] Yes, they are.” Similarly, in March 2022, 15 NDP riding executives sent a letter to the central NDP executive calling for an independent investigation into alleged mistreatment of volunteers and other issues—a demand that the party executive agreed to, with a commitment to “addressing the outstanding matters.”

These levels of tension are unusual. Along with providing local support for a party during and around an election, constituency associations can be a primary way for a political party to connect with what voters in a riding want to talk about and hear. “If the constituency association is really good at what they do, they end up becoming part of the fabric of the community,” said Whitney Issik back in 2019, when the UCP’s Calgary-Glenmore constituency association was “at 2,500 members” (a number that was down to 814 in March 2022). “It really is that linkage between the membership and the party [executive], and a community to the party,” said Issik. Her riding, Calgary-Glenmore, she said, has “a lot of commonality—common histories [and] folks that have a can-do, get-it-done attitude…. For me it’s just true Calgary.”

Left: Jennifer Burgess and Dany Allard door knocking in Lakeview. Right: Burgess and NDP staffer Garett Spelliscy at the community association/daycare as Nagwan Al-Guneid wins the nomination for the NDP. (Tadzio Richards)

It’s May 10, 2022, the day of the NDP nomination vote in Calgary-Glenmore. The president of the local NDP association, David Hyttenrauch, stands at the “Alberta’s NDP” podium in front of a portable backdrop showing a Rocky Mountain vista, in the Palliser-Bayview-Pumphill community association and daycare. Toys, bright learning materials and child-size chairs are stored along the white walls. NDP nomination candidates Jennifer Burgess and Nagwan Al-Guneid sit with their supporters—along with Edmonton-Whitemud MLA Rakhi Pancholi, Calgary-Edgemont nominee Julia Hayter and party staff Brandon Stevens and Garett Spelliscy—in rows of stackable plastic chairs. Roughly 40 people are in the room. Almost all of them wear masks.

Al-Guneid entered the nomination race in early March. A sustainable-energy analyst who came to the University of Calgary from Yemen on a full scholarship at age 17, she is the director of Business Renewables Centre Canada—a non-profit supporting “large-scale” renewable energy development. Her campaign, which had a strong social media presence, including focused, on-message videos introducing herself as a candidate and endorsements from medical and finance professionals not obviously affiliated with the NDP, was helped by Esmahan Razavi, a principal at a public relations firm who wrote a notable CBC op-ed in 2022. “Calgary is two different cities at the same time,” wrote Razavi. “One is a corporate city whose greatest success lies in a vision of the past,” where the brand is “corporate and cowboy.” The other city, “My Calgary,” she wrote, “just elected its first racialized woman mayor, after electing the first Muslim mayor of a large North American city. My Calgary is Canada’s third-most diverse city… where people move from across the world for everything from academics to tech to film to renewable energy.”

“Over the duration of this campaign the constituency association membership more than doubled, with 338 registered members,” says Hyttenrauch. “Out of those, 267, or 80 per cent, cast ballots, which is an amazing turnout.”

He then announced who’d won the right to represent the NDP in the riding: “I would like to welcome your nominee to the podium: Nagwan Al-Guneid.”

Al-Guneid comes to the podium, to loud applause, as Burgess visibly holds back tears. Burgess began campaigning in November 2021, because “we didn’t know the timeline” for when the party would vet another candidate and set a voting date. She ran “a strong campaign,” says Al-Guneid, thanking Burgess and then a long list of people, including “the party staff for always being there for us when we asked questions and who work long hours to support this party.

“Right now, there are so many [Calgarians] who are politically homeless,” she says. “I want to help them find a voice. I want to help them to find a home with Alberta’s NDP.”

In an interview after the speeches—after Spelliscy made a call for donations: “We have a great candidate, we have great volunteers, and we have everything going for us, but we have to match the Conservatives dollar for dollar!”—Al-Guneid says that Calgary-Glenmore “is not an easy riding [to win]. We’ve been door knocking a lot, and every third door is either a geologist, a geophysicist or an oil and gas engineer,” she says. “People are looking for answers about the future of the oil and gas sector…. We need to share that the party has solutions and ideas for the future, because people want more hopeful messages.”

Left: Jason Luan (left), UCP candidate in Calgary-Foothills, with Travis Toews. Right: Toews launches his campaign to lead the UCP at the Calgary Stampede grounds Rotary House under a portrait of John Wayne.

By May 18, when Jason Kenney announced he would resign as premier, poll aggregator 338 projected a close provincial election, with the UCP getting 43 seats and the NDP 44, including 17 in Calgary. The odds of winning were put at 50/50.

On the day after Kenney announced his intention to resign, and with the city up for grabs, the NDP brought 21 MLAs and nominees to Calgary’s cSpace Studio Theatre to gather around Rachel Notley as she gave “remarks to all Albertans” and took questions from the media via Zoom. As they stand outside the doors of the theatre, waiting to be allowed in to join Notley, already inside, Edmonton-Mill Woods MLA Christina Gray gives the candidates a final instruction: “You need to look at the back of Rachel’s head like it’s the most interesting thing you’ve ever seen.”

The NDP candidates at cSpace include Calgary nominees such as Nagwan Al-Guneid, Druh Farrell and Diana Batten, a nurse and the party’s candidate in Calgary-Acadia, the riding held by Tyler Shandro, Alberta’s health minister during the worst of the pandemic.

For each successful NDP nomination candidate, the nomination gauntlet had culminated with a call for donations. At Farrell’s nomination meeting at the Bowness Community Hall, MLA Joe Ceci put out the request. “I’m giving $500. Who’s going to match me?” he said, making the donation call auctioneer-style. “1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, keep ’em up, 7 hands! OK! $400 Four hands, thank you!”—raising $20,000 from the crowd of some 150 NDP supporters.

Farrell’s was by far the biggest of all the NDP’s nomination events in Calgary. “I was born and raised in Alberta, I’ve lived here all my life,” she told the crowd in the gym-sized hall with white cement walls. Under the UCP, said Farrell, “our healthcare, school curriculum, our universities, eldercare, our parks, affordable housing… have become almost unrecognizable in a few short years. I found I could not simply stand by and watch it happen.”

“I’ve had my eye on trying to get Druh to step up and run for us as a candidate for some time,” said Notley, following Farrell at the podium in Bowness. “We’re building a team that is going to lead Alberta back to our best days.” The supporters cheered.

Now, in the cSpace theatre in Calgary, Notley stands with Farrell and other nominees. They gaze at her. She looks into the camera. “I come with a message for all those Albertans who might have voted for the UCP and feel let down by their actions and behaviour over the last two years,” she says. “You deserve better.”

The UCP this time is largely nominating incumbents; change for the party lies in changing leaders.

Unlike in 2019, the UCP this time is largely nominating incumbents; change for the party lies in changing leaders. In early June at the Calgary Stampede grounds, Travis Toews, the former finance minister and at the time the presumed front-runner in the leadership race, launched his campaign at the Rotary House, a log-cabin-style gathering hall. In front of some 150 UCP members, at a podium beneath a painting of John Wayne, Toews delivered a speech befitting his reputation as a family-oriented, manly accountant. “We must lead with strength and humility and return to the values that define us,” he said. The crowd applauded. Country music swelled from the speakers. “Got my honey on my arm, Jesus in my heart,” went the lyrics to “County Line,” by High Valley, a band from La Crete in northern Alberta. Calgary cabinet ministers such as Tyler Shandro, Sonya Savage and Jason Luan, all previously strong supporters of Kenney, gathered with Toews, Whitney Issik and other MLAs for a group photo. “We work hard, live right,” went the song. “Tear it up on a Saturday night.”

Nearly five months later, on October 6, when the UCP elected a new leader from seven candidates, poll aggregator 338 projected the UCP winning 51 seats, with the NDP getting 36, including only nine seats in Calgary. The leadership race gave the UCP a bump.

But just before the race results are announced, that polling trend isn’t matched by widespread jubilation inside the BMO Centre on the Calgary Stampede grounds. Some 1,500 UCP members fill the convention hall. Balloons hang above the stage and podium in front of a giant Alberta flag. A bank of TV cameras faces the stage. The atmosphere is expectant, but it’s more tense than celebratory, music barely discernible under the conversational murmur in the room.

Our darker political impulses can play out in the brightest light in Alberta, and October 6, 2022, was one of those times. Out of nearly 124,000 UCP members (59 per cent of whom are from outside Calgary and Edmonton), 84,593 ballots were cast. Danielle Smith eked out a narrow win over Toews on the sixth ballot. Deriving the bulk of her support from rural voters angry at Ottawa and COVID-19 restrictions, Smith made her signature campaign promise the Sovereignty Act, proposed legislation that would allow the provincial government to refuse to enforce federal laws.

“We will not have our voices silenced and censored,” she said in her victory speech. “We will not be told what we must put in our bodies in order to work or to travel. We will not have our resources landlocked, or our energy phased out of existence by virtue-signalling prime ministers. Albertans, not Ottawa, will chart our own destiny on our own terms.”

Balloons fell from the ceiling. Confetti burst in the air. Smith smiled, waved at the crowd, then stepped off the stage and exited the hall without posing for photos.

Smith wasn’t an MLA and thus needed to run in a by-election to sit in the Legislature. She grew up in Calgary and went to the University of Calgary, but declined to run in Calgary-Elbow, a seat left vacant when MLA Doug Schweitzer (UCP) resigned at the end of August. Instead, Smith ran in Brooks-Medicine Hat, leaving Calgary-Elbow vacant for nearly nine months until the next election, scheduled for May 29, 2023. Smith’s promised Sovereignty Act hadn’t generated a warm response in Calgary—Deborah Yedlin, president and CEO of the Calgary Chamber of Commerce, said it would “cause significant investment uncertainty”—and the empty seat spurred the impression that Smith felt Calgarians don’t need full representation in the Legislature when the Sovereignty Act is introduced. Until the 2023 election, said Smith, her government would have “the adjacent MLA take care of issues in Calgary-Elbow.”

Tadzio Richards is the associate editor of Alberta Views. Send your perspective on the election to letters@albertaviews.ca.

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If I were asked, however, “Were you any different with your all-in assaults on character, honesty, charity and even clothing choices when Canada’s leader was Stephen Harper?” I’d have to admit I was not. His choice of cowboy shirts and hats at the Calgary Stampede, year after year—even his way of walking in cowboy boots—sandpapered me, and I’m talking roughest grade. It seemed to say so much about the man.

From my current perspective (i.e., with my choice of leader in power) it seems obvious that political partisanship should not equal in vehemence sports fanaticism; should not verge on the hatred of warring criminal gangs. It should be more dignified, like an Oxford debate. How Oxonian was I in the Harper era Um, not very. How likely was I to see merit in anything the Conservatives legislated between 2006 and 2015 Not at all.

Someone who sees value in partisan competition would likely tell me I was simply responding from my value system in an honest way and that I’m likewise functioning out of that value set now. That’s a nice out, but I don’t think it’s true. In fact, my value system probably adjusts itself so that I can approve my political team and damn the other side as needed.

I wouldn’t be the only one. If, say, the current Liberal government were to come up with a bill that the Conservatives would love if only they’d proposed it, the opposition would certainly speak against it, denigrate it to the press and vote against it (all hands on deck!). Otherwise, they’d be breathing life into their enemy, admitting that once in a blue moon Justin gets it right.

In this scenario, there’s nothing for the government to gain by trying to strike a balance. In fact, if they did propose things philosophically acceptable to both sides, their supporters would feel the party had both wandered from its principles and contradicted its contention that the opposition are fools. The idea of both sides sitting down and working out a compromise, with the public watching, is laughable—like expecting the Montagues and Capulets to negotiate how best to assist their lovebirds, Romeo and Juliet.

Number 9: No False Testimony Against Thy Neighbour. Let’s face it: In politics, this one was turfed long ago.

This strikes me as a big problem for democracy. As for those who have strived for mutual respect in question period, give up now. Put your efforts into something more possible, like global nuclear disarmament.

But before giving up on this, I should see if there are any basic rules both sides uphold. For this I’m going to employ the Ten Commandments, with apologies to anyone who follows a different rulebook. I’ll restrict myself to commandments 5 through 10: the ones relating to social conduct.

Number 5: Honour Thy Father and Mother. At least in terms of parliamentary conduct, this may be a commandment upheld by all. That is, jumping up and yelling “Your father is flatulent!” is not done.

Number 6: Murder. Killing opposing parliamentarians is also not done—though there is sometimes hopeless disagreement on what constitutes “murder.”

Number 7: Adultery. This might seem an area of agreement, but I’m not so sure. While many Americans say they’re not offended by their president’s having had an affair with a porn star, the same set of facts would overturn a Canadian parliamentarian’s canoe. But I’m not sure our MPs and MLAs are above tossing a juicy adultery rumour onto social media—or, rather, letting a minion do so, someone who could be tossed under the bus later if need be.

Number 8: Theft. Here we have a value that’s supposedly agreed upon but which certain candidates and parties have broken rather publicly. For example: willingness to use information obtained by hacking or robocalling the other side’s voting list (obtained by theft) and giving out wrong polling addresses for election day.

Number 9: No False Testimony Against Thy Neighbour. Let’s face it: In politics, this one was turfed long ago. The fellow running the opposition in Alberta has been singled out by reporters for flunking fact checks daily. I don’t think his problem is poor internet research skills. The fake news phenomenon drifting north has turned truth into fairytale. “Surely to goodness an adult person like you doesn’t believe in unassailable truth…!”

Number 10: No Coveting Thy Neighbour’s Wife or Property. I’m fairly sure all Canadian politicians, if asked publicly if they live by this moral sanction, would shout “Yes! And how dare you even ask?” I’m also surprised this is still one of the 10 commandments. After all, coveting, defined as yearning for, is sort of what capitalism runs on.

Fred Stenson’s most recent novel is Who By Fire (Doubleday). Other books include The Trade, Lightning and The Great Karoo.

The post Moral Chameleons appeared first on Alberta Views.

The UCP is a merger of the Wildrose and Progressive Conservative parties. In the 2015 provincial election, when the NDP won a majority government, the two conservative parties got 52 per cent of the vote between them but lost the election. The PCs’ 44-year dynasty came to an end. Two years later, in separate decisions, the two conservative parties voted to unify.

The new, combined party had 27 MLAs (all but two of them male) and no official policies. The UCP policy convention isn’t until this May, but all three leadership candidates—former federal Conservative cabinet minister Kenney, former Wildrose leader Brian Jean and insolvency lawyer Doug Schweitzer—promised to balance the budget, “restore the Alberta Advantage” and repeal NDP legislation including the carbon tax and protections for farm and ranch workers’ safety. A fourth candidate, former Wildrose president Jeff Callaway, promised the same but quit the race to support Kenney.

Now Callaway was standing at the back of the hall with Kenney supporters, including Jason Nixon, the tall UCP MLA for Rimbey-Rocky Mountain House-Sundre, chanting “Ja-son! Ja-son!” as the candidate entered the hall. Kenney supporters had been given the middle section of the hall, with Schweitzer supporters on the left, facing the stage, and Brian Jean supporters seated to the right. I stood at the back, between the Kenney and Jean supporters, who were cheering like sports fans for their man.

“Ja-son!”

“Bri-an!”

“Ja-son!”

“Guys! How are you?” said Kenney as he shook hands in the crowd on the way to his seat. A man in the Kenney section shouted out, loud enough that all 2,000 people in attendance could hear: “The next premier of Alberta right there!”

Talk of uniting the right in Alberta began in earnest on July 6, 2016, when Kenney announced he was running for the leadership of the PCs with the intention to merge with the Wildrose. The NDP is an “accidental government,” he said in Calgary. “Together, we must begin the renewal of Canada’s conservative movement right here in its heartland.”

It wasn’t the first time Kenney had played a role in uniting right-wing parties on the outside looking in at government. From 1997 to 2016 he represented a federal riding in southeast Calgary. Initially famous in Ottawa as part of the “Snack Pack,” a group of young conservatives that included fellow MP Rob Anders and staffer Ezra Levant, Kenney supported Preston Manning, then Stockwell Day, then Stephen Harper as the federal Canadian Alliance party merged with—took over—the Progressive Conservative party in 2003, creating a single neo-conservative party that more moderate Red Tories such as former prime minister Joe Clark refused to join. In the Harper government, Kenney held several cabinet portfolios, including Minister of Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism. After the federal Conservatives lost the 2015 election, Kenney entered provincial politics (though he retained his federal seat and continued to be paid as an MP until September 23, 2016). In some circles the move was cause for celebration. “The well-known social conservative,” as he was described by a writer with LifeSite News, a popular anti-abortion website, “has embarked on a quest to unite the right in Alberta in order to take down Rachel Notley’s NDP. ”

Kenney’s plan for Conservative unity—which he posted on Facebook and elsewhere and periodically updated with check marks beside the steps completed—was simple: Get elected as PC leader; negotiate with the Wildrose to create a “united free-enterprise party”; allow time for a “grassroots” debate; have the “grassroots” vote for unity; and then have a leadership election for the “new, united party.” He bought a brand new blue Dodge Ram pickup, strategically tagged it with bumper stickers—“Stop the Carbon Tax” and “I Love Canadian Pipelines”—and drove around Alberta raising support and money through his political action committee (PAC), Unite Alberta.

Sixteen months after he announced a plan to unite the right in Alberta, Jason Kenney won the UCP leadership election on the first ballot.

On November 5, 2016, he rolled into Red Deer for the PC policy forum ahead of the PC leadership convention the following March. He didn’t come alone. Kenney’s campaign bused in hundreds of voting-age youth, mostly young men from an unnamed Christian college (or colleges), as the Calgary Herald reported it, “…to vote for a pro-Kenney slate on the PC youth association executive, which selects 20 delegates to the leadership convention.” The youth—wearing blue or camouflage-coloured “Unite Alberta” baseball caps—made their votes, posed for selfies with ex-prime minister Harper (also there to support Kenney), then got back on the buses and returned to their never-named hometowns.

Immediately after the policy forum, Calgary MLA and PC leadership candidate Sandra Jansen resigned from the race, citing aggressive and sexually charged verbal and written harassment during the Red Deer convention—abuse that often focused on her support for women’s reproductive rights. “My presence in this race has so enraged a socially regressive element,” she said in an email to supporters, “that I fear it will take away from our ability to fight what is turning out to be a very hostile takeover attempt on the party.” Donna Kennedy-Glans, the only other female among the six candidates, also resigned that same day, saying in an email to reporters that “right now, politics in Alberta is polarizing and there is limited opportunity for centrist voices to be heard.” On November 17 Jansen crossed the floor of the Legislature to join the NDP government.

“We cannot put power ahead of principle,” said PC leadership candidate Richard Starke to members at the Red Deer forum. “If Albertans view our actions solely as a thinly veiled grab for power we are telling them that we have learned nothing from the 2015 defeat.” The caution was ignored. On March 18, 2017, PC members elected Kenney as their new leader, with 75 per cent of the vote and a mandate to pursue unity with the Wildrose. The date for the unity vote was set for July 22.

Sandra Jansen quit the PC race, citing aggressive and sexually charged verbal and written harassment.

By the time of his Calgary Stampede pancake breakfast at the Acadia Recreation Complex in southeast Calgary on July 8, 2017, Kenney had been campaigning for over a year. I met him face to face after standing in a long line that began outside the arena-sized hall. Municipal council candidate Jeromy Farkas—a protégé of the Manning Centre, which wants to limit the role of government—greeted people at the door. Another city council candidate, Chris “We Need a Tax Warrior” Davis, wrote a campaign cheque and lingered at the donation table set up beside the slow, snaking line of seniors and young families waiting to shake hands with “Jason.” Kenney stood in front of a pancake table wearing a black cowboy hat, a white button-up shirt and jeans that rode high and tight on the pear of his stomach. His hand was soft but his grip was firm, a handshake at first pliant but quickly ungiving. “Thank you for coming,” he said, and released his hand to grab the next palm in line, his face sweaty in the air-conditioned hall at 9:30 in the morning.

Kenney was easy to meet superficially. He shook hands at events big and small. He raised money. He did it most days of a week. Described by Maclean’s in 2011 as the “hardest-working MP” in Ottawa, Kenney, age 49, is not married and has no children. On the 2017 campaign trail in Alberta he described politics as a “vocation”—a beautiful description but not his only comment on a political career. As Marci McDonald reported in a detailed 2014 Walrus profile, Kenney once told Republican students at the University of San Francisco: “Politics is a tough life to keep close to your principles. Along with pride, one is constantly tempted to let the end justify the means.”

Money, of course, is among the means to power. Financial statements released by Elections Alberta on July 18, 2017, revealed that Kenney filed $1.46-million in expenses for the PC leadership contest. This included $662,728 for campaign staff such as campaign manager John Weissenberger—Stephen Harper’s close friend who in a Calgary Herald op-ed once dismissed global warming as a “theory” promoted by “a cabal of government-funded scientists, environmental activists and journalists.” The cost for staff alone was four times what Starke, the runner-up, spent on his entire campaign. But that wasn’t all: Kenney’s campaign spokesman, Blaise Boehmer, said Kenney’s Unite Alberta PAC had raised over $500,000 prior to the start of the PC leadership race, bringing the campaign donations above $2-million. Over 96 per cent of those early PAC donors were not identified.

“The NDP—the socialists and their allied special interest groups—understand that if they can win a second term in Alberta they will still the beating heart of free enterprise,” said Kenney at a campaign event I attended later that summer at the Paradise Valley golf course in Medicine Hat. “We need a premier who’s willing to stand up for this province, like we had premiers in the past,” he said, his voice rising through clapping and cheers from the packed clubhouse crowd. “We also need a premier who’s willing to stand up—like we frankly have never had in my lifetime—to defend the oil and gas industry!”

Since Kenney went to Ottawa as an MP in 1997, Alberta has grown by nearly 1.4-million people. The province now has a population of over four million, with a median age of 36.7—Canada’s youngest province. Nearly 84 per cent of Albertans live in urban areas and the province has the highest per capita ownership of smartphones. The population is younger, more ethnically diverse and more globally connected than 20 years ago.

In this context, the PCs’ lurch to the right under Kenney made some party members nervous. PC president Katherine O’Neill left the party in April 2017 to start a PAC—Alberta Together—to “shape a centrist voice going into the 2019 election.” Just before the July 22 unity vote, Calgary-South East PC MLA Rick Fraser told the Herald that to get his support a new united party must develop “moderate conservative” policies and ideals.

Wildrose leader Brian Jean reached out to these “centrist” conservatives. “Gone are the days when hard right governments are going to be successful in Alberta,” Jean told Calgary Sun columnist Rick Bell, just days before the unity vote. “Albertans want a common sense, middle-of-the-road government.”

The unexpected comment got attention. At a Jean-led rally for unity in Calgary on July 18, I spoke with long-time PC member Norman Schachar and his wife, Kathy. Schachar is a professor emeritus of surgery at the University of Calgary. “I’ve always felt the Wildrose was made up of people who are more right of centre—that is to say, right of Peter Lougheed,” he said. “Home schooling, anti-abortion, anti-gay; that’s too conservative for us. We have three daughters. They’re all professionals; they grew up in this province and went through public education. I’m not in favour of home schooling or private schools. I’m in favour of a strong public school board to which everyone can have access. So up until this moment I didn’t feel like I could vote for Jean in any capacity.”

“I came here in 1970,” he said. “I remember Lougheed with all these young guys with skinny-leg pants and skinny briefcases and you could see and feel that they were the future of Alberta. They were socially progressive but fiscally conservative. When I shook hands [with Jean], I said ‘I’m a Peter Lougheed conservative.’ And he leaned in and said ‘So am I.’ I’m impressed—he’s not saying ‘It’s a Christian province, don’t you know, and we won’t have any abortion.’ He did have to say he supports parents’ rights to dictate schools, so that’s a negative. But if the parties are united and Brian Jean gets elected as the leader, could I support him I think I could. We have to support uniting the right. It’s a critical moment. If the right doesn’t get its shit together then the left is going to be in for a long time and Alberta is going to be a much different place. That’s what worries me.”

Brian Jean and Derek Fildebrandt after the Wildrose unity vote, July 22, 2017. Fildebrandt had told reporters he wouldn’t support Jean for UCP leader.

Until the July 22 vote, uniting the right wasn’t a sure thing. While the PCs only needed 50 per cent of members to agree, the Wildrose needed a 75 per cent majority to merge. On a Saturday in Red Deer, Wildrose members gathered at the Radisson Hotel to vote on unity, both in person and online. The day started at 8 a.m. with a 90-minute member debate moderated by party president Jeff Callaway in the 7,000 ft2 Winspear Ballroom. Most speakers spoke to the yes side. But not all—some members recalled the “entitlement” of the PC party when it was in power, comparing the push for unity to the 2014 floor crossing to the PCs by then-leader Danielle Smith and other Wildrose MLAs. “This is a takeover by the PC party,” said one naysayer. Others said the Wildrose could win the 2019 election on their own. “A cow wouldn’t vote for the NDP right now,” said long-time member Dave Craig. “The Wildrose hasn’t been given a chance.”

The results of the vote wouldn’t be announced until 4 p.m. So to help fill the day, a Special General Meeting Agenda—available to all—listed speakers who would give presentations in the Cascades Ballroom, a large room peppered with round tables and a podium way at the front. The first speaker was John Robson, a National Post columnist and, at the time, a contributor to Rebel Media—Ezra Levant’s latest venture, which was broadcasting from the hotel. Robson said if conservatives agreed that humans are causing climate change—but then did nothing about it—they would “look like heartless, brainless, miserable fools. And that’s not good politics.”

“But the science is wrong,” said Robson. “It is not true that the earth is undergoing unprecedented changes. It is not true that humans are causing them. It is not true that they portend disaster if we don’t stop using fossil fuels. Not one of those things is true, and that’s why we do not need carbon taxes. So if that’s your position, you’re safe intellectually, you’re safe morally and you’re also—which matters in this room—you’re safe politically, which sounds like a pretty good deal to me.”

This got a rousing cheer. As did a later speech by Cypress-Medicine Hat MLA Drew Barnes, who said “the science is not settled” on climate change. Another MLA, Grant Hunter, Cardston-Taber-Warner, praised the Alberta Advantage—“widespread tax cuts, decreasing the size of government and deregulating domestic markets”—as “very good for my family.” Then Hunter said grassroots conservatives could best determine how to balance the budget. He left the podium and strolled around the room with a microphone. “How many people are here 100 people?” he said. “Who here has a good idea to balance the budget Just put up your hand and give me one idea—these are going to be good.”

“Use some common sense like any successful business,” said an older man. “Don’t spend money if you don’t have it. Cut costs.”

“Make our transfer payments with oil instead of cash,” said another man. This got some laughs and clapping.

“Use public space for public good,” said a moustached man. “Airports right across the country advertise on their parkades and the money goes to the airport. Why we don’t put advertisements on hospitals and hospital parkades in this province blows me away.”

“OK,” said Hunter. “What else?”

“When we have our children, they’re 18 when we wean them,” said a woman at a table mid-room. “We have one segment of our population that we have not weaned for generations. We need to cut a total department out of the government, and that is the worst leeches that we have: Indian Affairs.” This got the loudest clapping of all.

“OK,” said Hunter. He sidled back toward the podium, talking all the way. “If we had time, we could probably go around this room and come up with 50 different ideas about how to fix our budget,” he said. “We’ve got to get back to where the people are.”

In late afternoon in the main ballroom, Strathmore-Brooks MLA Derek Fildebrandt—who in the past year and more had attended multiple events with Jason Kenney, and said he would not support Brian Jean for the leadership of a united right—reassured Wildrose members that “a vast majority of PCs share our core values. The leftists that used to be in that party are, thankfully, at least some of them, already gone to the NDP. ”

In the crowded main ballroom, shortly after the announcement of the vote—a vote that went 95 per cent in favour of unity—party president Jeff Callaway took to the stage. For conservatives, he said, a vote to merge the right “is about being proud, being strong. It’s about one day, as government, freeing this province from the failed socialist shackles of the NDP!”

“Let the word spread,” he shouted. “Hope is on the way!”

“In choosing a leader for the UCP, we’ll almost certainly be electing a premier.” —Jason Kenney

“For the conservative coalition to succeed,” said Danielle Smith, the former leader of the Wildrose, in an interview with Global News, “it needs to embrace a broad spectrum—Jason Kenney and Sandra Jansen should be able to be under the same tent if there’s going to be a large enough coalition to win.”

All three UCP leadership candidates claimed to represent such a “big tent” party. Doug Schweitzer, a former campaign manager for PC leader Jim Prentice, called for greater equity for women and LGBTQ+ people. He also proposed cuts to business taxes and a lower minimum wage. Brian Jean, calling himself a “positive” and “moderate” candidate, promised to balance the budget, starting with $2.6-billion in cuts to public services. Alberta’s current annual deficit is over $10-billion, but Jean didn’t say where he would find the other $8-billion or so in savings. That amount happens to be “the approximate cost of Alberta’s entire K–12 education system,” as Public Interest Alberta’s Joel French noted.

In contrast, Kenney didn’t get tangled in details. He signed a “grassroots guarantee” pledging that party members, not the leader, would decide UCP policies. The only candidate to not attend Calgary’s 2017 Pride Parade, Kenney said conservatives who did not join the UCP were “folks who are not comfortable in a big tent. They’re not comfortable with a diversity of opinions. They want an echo chamber. They want to live in a partisan pup tent.”

The UCP membership had a choice. On October 28, 2017, after five leadership debates and three days of phone and online voting, Kenney won the UCP election with 61.1 per cent of the vote on the first ballot. Some 15 minutes before the official announcement, the results were posted to the UCP website—and tweeted by journalists—then quickly taken down. Few in the BMO Centre were aware this had happened, and if the Kenney supporters knew, they didn’t hold back when the result was read from the stage. “Woo-hoo!” shouted MLA Jason Nixon, standing in the cheering crowd near Jeff Callaway and Kenney’s campaign manager, John Weissenberger. “Yeaaaah!”

At the time, the UCP claimed 106,000 members. About 55 per cent of them—58,219—voted in the leadership race. Among conservative Albertans who did not vote were former PC leadership candidate Richard Starke, who refused to join the UCP after the July unity votes, and MLA Rick Fraser, who resigned from the party to sit as an Independent the day after the first leadership debate was held in Calgary on September 20.

At that debate, Doug Schweitzer—who got a mere 7.3 per cent of the final vote—said, “we need to get the social issues right” so that matters such as the UCP stance on gay–straight alliances in schools wouldn’t turn voters off the party. Kenney—endorsed by Campaign Life Coalition, an anti-abortion lobby that claims “gay people are not born that way”—had previously told the Calgary Herald that parents should be notified if their children join a gay–straight alliance. Critics called this “outing.” Kenney didn’t address the issue at the debate. But he did say what he would do as premier.

“I would appoint a minister whose sole focus is deregulation,” said Kenney, promising “a period of sustained fiscal restraint” to balance the budget. “We made sacrifices in the 1990s,” he said, in reference to the Klein-era cuts to public services, “and we’re going to have to make some sacrifices again.”

At least two polling firms, ThinkHQ and Mainstreet Research/Postmedia, predicted Jean would win more seats than Kenney in a provincial election. But online social conservatives—and Jeff Callaway—relentlessly criticized Jean for supporting “middle-of-the-road government.” Jean got 31.5 per cent of the vote. After posing with a triumphant Kenney, he walked off the stage, sat down next to his mother and held his head in his hands. Then he and his wife quickly left the building.

As Kenney shook hands with supporters at the after-party in the hall, UCP MLAs—almost all of them former Wildrose MLAs—who had supported Kenney during the campaign got onstage for a group photo. Derek Fildebrandt, facing a hit-and-run charge and now sitting as an Independent MLA, was among them, along with Grant Hunter and Drew Barnes—11 MLAs in total. They grinned. Cameras flashed. “These are the 11 smartest guys in Alberta,” said Nixon to the photographers with a smile.

Tadzio Richards is an associate editor with Alberta Views.

The post The Takeover appeared first on Alberta Views.

Hey, you’ve got to start somewhere.

The serious work of forming the new version of the Alberta Party, which until a couple of years ago had been a vaguely right-of-centre fringe party, began in 2009 when the Renew Alberta movement announced it was going to create a new centrist political party. Renew Alberta was essentially a group of activists whose only common affiliation was a commitment to political change. It was co-chaired by Chima Nkemdirim, the organizer and social-media guru behind Liberal MLA Kent Hehr’s 2008 and Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi’s 2010 victories. Nkemdirim is now on the Alberta Party board.

Through various channels, including the November 2009 “Reboot Alberta” conference—the activist expression of commentators such as Michael Brechtel and lawyer and former Tory Ken Chapman, both of whom are now tied to the Alberta Party—Renew Alberta found and talked with members of the Alberta Party prior to forming their own party. Renew Alberta and the Alberta Party realized their similarities outweighed their differences, principally on the issue of democratic deficit. The Alberta Party executive met in early January 2010 and named Edwin Erickson—formerly of the Greens—as party leader, giving him a mandate to unite Renew Alberta and the Alberta Party. In February 2010 the activist group and political party merged, agreeing, in policy terms, to start again from scratch.

In essence, a whole bunch of people upset and frustrated with Alberta politics got together and decided to use an existing party, the Alberta Party, as their vehicle of change. It needed a new engine and a steering wheel, but a brand new car was too expensive and so the group settled for the used one with the great hood ornament: the perfect name.

To read the entire article, from the May 2011 issue, click here.

Gillespie revisits “Party, Started”:

Ahead of the 2012 election, the Alberta Party had just renewed itself under the banner of centrist pragmatism. The people behind it all saw Albertans were tiring of a PC party rooted in cronyism, that the Liberals were a zombie brand, and that Brian Mason was honourable but not Premier-material. The rationale for renewal was sound. The province was ready for change. Which is precisely what happened. Alison Redford imploded. Danielle Smith imploded. Jim Prentice failed to resonate. Mason was put on ice. The stage was set for one of the generational shifts Alberta politics is famous for.

But the Alberta Party didn’t step into the void, mostly because they didn’t plan for Rachel Notley, whose poise and intellect offered young, urban Albertans the alternative they were looking for in the 2015 election. The party did elect its first MLA in leader Greg Clark, who proved to be an astute but dry politician. He remains an MLA but resigned as leader in November 2017 to allow the party to “re-galvanize” itself, he said. In other words, he was pushed out by party forces wanting someone more dynamic to take on Notley and Jason Kenney as things gear up for a 2019 election.

Which means the Alberta Party finds itself roughly where it was eight years ago—trying to make moderate politics relevant. Ironically they’re going about it in the same way. In 2010 the dialogue was powered by Renew Alberta, whereas today a grassroots movement called Alberta Together is informally working with the party to carve out an identity voters can grasp and trust. At the June 2017 Alberta Together conference, the talk was about creating a centrist party for voters who care about fiscal prudence married to social inclusiveness. In other words, nicer than the PCs and savvier than the NDP.

As in 2010, this merry band of middlers believe they have the wind in their sails. On the left, the NDP seem to have angered everybody. On the right, the Wildrose were extreme and the PCs corrupt—which means the UCP could be extremely corrupt. All of which means the Alberta Party is still a strong idea on paper, and maybe not just on paper. Calgary MLA and former NDPer Karen McPherson crossed the floor to join the Alberta Party just before Clark resigned. The party’s path to power, however, is far from straightforward. Some will view the Alberta Party as too much of a compromise; others will see a credible alternative to the binary system we see corroding US politics.

Curtis Gillespie is editor of Eighteen Bridges.

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