As the 2023 campaign opened last spring, the NDP and UCP were essentially tied. The UCP was receiving support from Albertans who credited a conservative government rather than high oil prices for a humming economy. The NDP was backed by Albertans focused on the collapse of public services and the unfair distribution of benefits from oil revenues. But, as every canvasser learns, many undecided voters barely follow politics. They only ask: How will your party help me immediately?
During the first week of May two fellow Edmontonians and I doorknocked in the swing riding of Sherwood Park. The slogan on the NDP pamphlets we were handing out—“A better future for Alberta”—foreshadowed a lacklustre NDP campaign. Avis’s “We’re number 2. We try harder” would have been catchier. A winner might have been “We’ll slash your cost of living.”
My fellow volunteers agreed, adding they disliked the tone of the campaign literature. It contrasted Danielle Smith the flip-flopping wackadoodle with Rachel Notley the trustworthy alternative.
These messages clearly weren’t resonating with undecided voters. I predicted that the party’s campaign would soon pivot from a leadership focus to an emphasis on NDP promises to reduce costs of living. But it didn’t happen. Evelyn Hamdon, an equity and human rights specialist and party volunteer, summed it up best: “The platform was Rachel Notley.” The NDP in 2023 never did answer the question most marginal voters were asking: What’s in it for me?
“The NDP made the same mistake in 2023 that they did in 2019-spent too much time attacking and too little time understanding what motivates people. Whoever was giving advice didn’t listen to us”
– NDP volunteer Brenda Kuzio
A survey commissioned by insolvency trustees MNP in late spring 2023 found that 72 per cent of Albertans were worried about their ability to repay their debts, the highest rate in Canada. A staggering 51 per cent of Albertans said they were “$200 away or less from not being able to meet all their financial obligations.”
UCP strategists took advantage of the surge in oil and gas royalty revenues to assuage these fears and buy votes. Their measures included temporary subsidies for electricity, a temporary suspension of fuel taxes, and a $600 cheque mailed to select Alberta households. Danielle Smith opened the election by promising to cut the tax rate from 10 per cent to 8 per cent on the first $38,000 of taxable income.
The NDP focus on leadership and the healthcare crisis, however, seemed to put the affordability/inflation crisis on the back burner. While the UCP promised Albertans a potential tax cut of $760, the NDP merely pledged not to increase taxes. But why not raise the “basic personal amount” exemption on income from the UCP’s projected $22,000 by another $10,000…? That would have allowed an Albertan earning $40,000 a year to keep $1,000, much more than they would have gotten from the UCP tax cut. That cut could have been paid for through higher tax rates on wealthy Albertans and/or an easily justifiable higher royalty rate on fossil fuel companies. It would have reminded voters that the UCP robbed taxpayers for years by failing to peg exempted income to inflation while at the same time giving corporations huge tax cuts.
The NDP could also have responded to the UCP agenda with left-wing populism, by ending UCP-abetted corporate ripoffs. In government the NDP had introduced a rate cap on electricity for Albertans paying the regulated rate option (RRO), which, when the party was defeated in 2019, stood at 6.8 cents per kWh. The UCP removed this cap, and prices soared. About 35 per cent of Albertans pay the RRO, because they lack the income and credit rating to qualify for the low fixed rates offered by utility companies to members of the middle class, like myself. I pay 7.59 cents per kWh, a rate fixed until 2025. But by December 2022, RRO customers were paying 22–24 cents per kWh. They were paying 31.8–32.8 cents per kWh by July 2023. In other words, just weeks removed from an election, low-income Albertans were paying four times what I pay for electricity.
The NDP promised to reduce the RRO in July–September to 12 cents per kWh, part of a $450 savings package per household. They could even have justified an all-year rate of 9 cents per kWh, which is what the rate would have been had they won reelection in 2019. But they failed to properly publicize even their more modest promise.
The party’s conservatism regarding auto insurance rates was even more puzzling. Alberta’s rates became Canada’s highest after the UCP removed an NDP-era 5 per cent cap on increases. In a study for British Columbia’s public auto insurer, ICBC, Ernst & Young reported that median auto insurance in Alberta in 2022 was $3,151. In Saskatchewan it was $1,249, and in Manitoba it was $1,373—thanks, in both cases, to long-established public auto insurance. For many Alberta drivers, however, the gap was larger still. A 30-year-old employed, married man driving a 2019 Ford F350, with one accident in 2021, would have paid $5,042 for insurance in Calgary in 2022. In Saskatoon? $1,416.
In a speech in 2020 Rachel Notley toyed with the idea of instituting public auto insurance. But during the 2023 election campaign the NDP promised only to freeze auto insurance rates for 2023 and then reduce them in 2024.
If they had promised to bring in Saskatchewan rates, a $1,900 reduction for the median driver, the NDP would have bowled over the corporate-loving UCP. “The average Alberta family will see a reduction of $6,000 in their cost of living over the next year!” the NDP could have boasted. That would have come from a $1,000 tax cut, a $1,000 cut in electricity costs, $3,500 in auto insurance savings and the NDP’s promised $500 per child grant to parents for extracurricular activities. Tighter rent controls as well as hefty increases to AISH, social assistance and low-income seniors and child subsidies to restore value lost during the UCP reign would also have been vote-getters. A raise in the minimum wage from $15 to $17.25, to match inflation since 2019, could also have been justified.
Many undecided voters barely follow politics. They only ask: How will your party help me immediately?
Even the vague promises the NDP did make regarding auto insurance and electricity rate cuts reached few Albertans, because of the party’s focus on the faults of the UCP leader. Several people who worked on the NDP campaign told me they were unaware of one or both of those proposed cuts. One Edmonton phone canvasser who throughout April and May made calls to Calgarians and residents in the “donut” seats—seats that encircle Edmonton—told me she knew nothing of either proposal. The script the party provided to her mentioned neither promise and focused instead on leadership. Earl Choldin, who likewise did phone canvassing in Edmonton, was unaware of the electricity rate promise, though he did know the party was promising to review auto insurance rates.
Both party volunteers regarded the script they were given as negative in tone and light on NDP policies. Robert Ascah, an NDP activist who had a long career with Alberta Treasury and the Alberta Treasury Branches, knew of neither NDP promise. He became aware of the UCP’s tax cut promise from news stories. The NDP focus on issues other than cost of living and the party’s vagueness on specific cuts cost them coverage on such issues.
Not everyone followed the script. Edmontonian Chee Chee Lorne told me: “Undecided voters know that Danielle Smith is untrustworthy, corrupt etc. To repeat that message to them was a waste of time, energy and resources.”
“When I was phone canvassing for the NDP,” he said, “what really seemed to hit home with voters were the NDP promises to reinstate the cap on electricity bills, remove the entrance fee to Kananaskis Country, reduce auto insurance rates, protect the Eastern Slopes from coal mining and toxic runoff that could poison the drinking water of Calgarians, and redirect millions of dollars in taxpayer subsidies being used to bail out super-profitable oil and gas companies into policies that would improve the situation for people dealing with high inflation—rebates etc.”
Some doorknockers and phone canvassers expressed their concerns about the negative message to party leaders. Cindy Nagassar in Calgary: “I told our riding president they needed to do more than show [Danielle Smith] in a negative light much like they did in 2019 with Jason Kenney. Guess they didn’t listen.” Labour lawyer Brenda Kuzio: “They made the same mistake this time that they did last time—spent too much time attacking and too little time understanding what motivates people. Whoever was giving advice didn’t listen to the many of us who sent in comments after the last election.” According to a labour official who spoke to me in confidence, the labour movement pleaded with the NDP to replace the negativity and focus on a hard-hitting progressive agenda.
Martin Lukacs, a former environment writer for The Guardian, suggested in The Breach why such concerns were ignored: “Lobbyists run today’s NDP—and they’re warping the party’s politics,” he wrote. Many officials appointed to run the NDP campaign, he argued, are “operatives who lobby for coal, banks and big tech.” They have long NDP pasts but now they also lobby for corporate goliaths. Nathan Rotman, the 2023 campaign manager, is a registered lobbyist for Airbnb. Senior adviser Brian Topp, who served as Notley’s first chief of staff in 2015, is a founding partner of GT and Company, a strategic advising firm, whose recent clients include the Bank of Montreal, McCain Foods and CN. Another adviser, Cheryl Oates, has lobbied for Uber in BC and for a US coal company. Former NDP cabinet minister Deron Bilous, now a senior vice-president with Counsel Public Affairs, wrote a post-election piece for a National Post supplement on strategy for the Alberta NDP in 2027 that Pierre Poilievre could endorse.
Compromised advisers and overcautious leaders prevented the NDP from providing a vision of the future Alberta economy. Ascah laments that this province is “sleepwalking into disaster” thanks to the “power of the fossil fuel industries.” He says a transition from fossil fuels to renewables is necessary to keep the planet habitable. The inevitable decline in fossil fuels markets will harm Albertans if our government doesn’t gradually move to a more diversified economy.
The NDP could have responded to the UCP agenda with left-wing populism, by promising to end UCP-abetted corporate ripoffs.
Has the NDP learned from the 2023 campaign to listen to the little guy rather than to professional strategists with corporate links? Political scientist John Kinnear is skeptical. “Democratic elections work upon the premise of ‘What are you going to do for me?’” he says. “The NDP doesn’t seem to grasp that point, and right out of the gates, they [were] back to their old habits.” Perpetual opposition parties, perhaps, can spread fear. But “governments are there to give hope.”
During the election the NDP predicted that a re-elected UCP would remove Alberta from the Canada Pension Plan and make taxpayers rather than oil companies pay to clean up orphan wells. The UCP disingenuously called the NDP charges “fear and smear.” We know, post-election, that the NDP was right. But a Cassandra is rarely rewarded. Along with predictions of their opponent’s real agenda, the NDP needs to provide its own vision.
The party should also remain authentic when the audience isn’t the fan club. During the election I attended six rallies of election workers where Rachel Notley spoke. A natural orator, the former premier was electric with her passionate defence of the NDP’s record in office and how the party would build upon that legacy if returned to power. The televised debate with Smith, however, featured a different Notley. As if afraid of offending swing voters, Notley appeared nervous and failed to defend the record of her earlier government. She notably neglected to remind Albertans of her government’s ordering auto insurance and utility companies to limit prices, or assure us that she would do so again.
Some argue that a more constructive NDP campaign would have changed nothing in “conservative Alberta.” But research by University of Alberta political scientist Jared Wesley suggests roughly half of Albertans view themselves as centrist or leftist. Quito Maggi, CEO of Mainstreet Research, predicted the NDP would win on election day even though his company’s polls showed the UCP leading among decided voters. Four days before the election he tweeted: “Across the 7 [Calgary] ridings we’re currently fielding, the undecided leans are breaking @alberta_NDP more than 7–1 over @Alberta_UCP.” A 7–1 conversion of the undecided vote provincially would have given the NDP four or five more Calgary seats, as well as Lethbridge East, several more “Edmonton donut” ridings—and a legislative majority. But it seems many undecided voters ultimately believed too little was at stake, and stayed home. Election turnout dropped from 68 per cent in 2019 to 62 per cent in 2023. With it the NDP’s chance to govern Alberta evaporate
Alvin Finkel is professor emeritus of history at Athabasca University. His latest book project is Humans: A People’s History.
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