Could Naheed Nenshi cause an NDP divorce?

Jordan: Being the leader of the NDP in Alberta might be one of the hardest jobs in politics. You have to speak to progressives who live in big cities, but you must be able to compete with conservative parties. And sometimes there are more than one for not just the rural or the small town vote, but for the votes of everyone in the province who depends on oil and gas for a living, which is how you get the NDP pushing for pipelines, which in turn doesn’t sit well with the federal NDP, who wants us to move away from fossil fuels. And that allows your opponents to paint you with that brush as well, which means you need to sound very different from say, Jagmeet Singh, but also your parties have the same names and use the same colors, and yeah. So anyway, it’s not a huge surprise that Rachel Notley quit, nor is it a huge surprise that whomever takes the job next will have a tough job winning over voters while staying loyal to the party and presenting a united national front for the New Democratic Party. Yikes, that’s a lot. What if the new leader of the Alberta NDP was a guy who hadn’t previously belonged to the party, who doesn’t have any of those ties to tradition, to a unified NDP or any alignment with the Federal Party? What if the new leader was just new? I am Jordan Heath-Rawlings. This is The Big Story. Graham Thomson is a long-time analyst of Alberta politics. He’s appeared in the CBC, The Star, The Tyee and Alberta Views Magazine among many others. Welcome Graham.

Graham Thomson: Hello, Jordan.

Jordan: Why don’t you start maybe for our outside of Alberta audience by giving us a quick rundown of the last provincial election in Alberta and what’s happened since then. I think most people know the NDP lost and then what?

Graham Thomson: Yeah, so what happened is 2023 we thought we might have a relatively tight race for Alberta politics. Normally we are a one-party province. The conservatives tend to win the elections. NDP 2015 won the election. We had a two-party system, and then 2019, the Conservatives, the UCP United Conservative Party won again. But it was really interesting. In 2023, we thought the NDP might come back under Rachel Notley, an NDP leader. She’s very well-liked, seasoned politician, first centre politics. In 2008, her father was leader of the NDP back in the day, this was the royalty when it comes to NDP in Alberta, up against Danielle Smith, A really contentious, very controversial leader who wasn’t well liked by a lot of the public. And we thought, wow, what’s going to happen? Well, the UCP won, but the thing is they won, but they lost a number of seats. They went from 60 seats to 49. NDP went from 23 seats to 38 as the largest opposition in Alberta history. So even though the NDP lost 38 seats, biggest opposition UCP won, but they lost a lot of ground, especially in Calgary. So that’s what happened in the election. But at that point, the clock started ticking for Rachel Notley as leader. She had won in 2015, but she lost in 2019, lost in 2023, and the clock began ticking as a question of not if she would step down, but when.

Jordan: What did she say about herself and the direction of the party when she did? You pointed out this was an NDP that had made a relatively sizable comeback. It’s not like she had nothing to rely on, but she walked away.

Graham Thomson: Yeah, the thing is, yeah, she stepped down in January of this year. We knew it was coming because look, she lost two elections in a row, people like her. But the thing is, the NDP knew itself. It did not defeat Danielle Smith, such an contentious, controversial person. And the NDP still couldn’t beat her. So everyone knew that writing was on the wall. And the thing is, nobody was trying to push her out. People have so much respect for her in the NDP. No one was trying to overtly push out Notley. They were just giving her time. She stepped down saying, look, we’ve done so much together in the biggest opposition in Alberta history, and it’s time for her to step aside and let a new generation, if I can call it that, step up to the plate.

Jordan: Who is that new generation? And I mean, this is why we’re talking to you today so far. Who’s running to replace her and what does the field look like just in general?

Graham Thomson: Yeah, so right now there’s six people entering the race. I’ll get to the punchline in a second. Six people. First it was Sarah Hoffman. Sarah Hoffman is a powerhouse, a veteran of Alberta politics based in Edmonton. And Edmonton is NDP country. All 20 of the provincial seats went to the NDP last election, so that’s where the power is. Sarah Hoffman, former minister of Health under the Notley government, was seen as a front runner. Kathleen Ganley, another veteran, former minister of Justice when Notley was premier, and Ganley is from Calgary, and the NDP is really keen on winning more seats in Calgary. Last election, they won 14 out of 26 seats. The NDP got more seats than the United Conservative Party in Calgary, which is seen as a more conservative city. Those two, by the way, are both MLAs. A third MLA is Jodi Calahoo Stonehouse from Edmonton-Rutherford. She’s very new to politics, and elected last year. Then we have Gil McGowan, Alberta Federation of Labour President. Then we had Rakhi Pancholi. I said we did have, I’ll explain that in a second. So Rakhi Pancholi, really dynamic lawyer from Edmonton MLA, and she ran in the race and she seems a very credible person. Then all of a sudden in March, things began to change in this race that began February 5. Within a month, someone entered the race, who is not a longtime NDP member. That’s Naheed Nenshi, Naheed Nenshi, former mayor of Calgary, enters the race and turns everything upside down. And with days of him entering the race, Pancholi, a young dynamic, very credible candidate, says I’m stepping aside to throw my support behind Naheed Nenshi. And so the race turned completely upside down when the former mayor, Naheed Nenshi of Calgary entered the race just a matter weeks ago actually.

Jordan: For those who aren’t that familiar with Nenshi, and as I mentioned Alberta politics, this is fascinating. Explain why. Because of who he is, this race has been turned upside down.

Graham Thomson: Yeah. And the thing is, first of all, he’s very well known. He’s not just known in Alberta, he’s known across the country. Naheed Nenshi-

Jordan: I mean, that’s why we’re talking to you. He’s a really interesting figure for everybody across the country.

Graham Thomson: Yes. And he was mayor of Calgary from 2010 to 2021. He’s an academic by training. And so he enters the race and this is somebody who we all know, we all talk about, very controversial figure. He’s very dynamic, really good public speaker. So he enters the race and we knew it was coming. In fact, I was calling him beforehand. The number of us in the media got interviews with him the day he was announcing, because it wasn’t a big announcement like talking to all the media one-on-one rooms. It was one-on-one interviews to explain what he was doing. It’s part of his strategy. And this caught fire. I was doing columns and appearing on national programs, CBC, CTV, doing various columns across the country because people were thinking, wow, this is actually interesting because look, the other names in the race, no one look in Alberta. People may have heard, of course, probably heard of Sarah Hoffman and Kathleen Ganley, but outside of Alberta, no one’s really heard of these people. So in comes Naheed Nenshi, former mayor of Calgary jumps into the race, and boy, what a huge splash he makes because all of a sudden everyone is talking about him because he is not an insider. He is not an NDP member until he joined the ranks. Basically all the others, and there’s five I’ve mentioned, are NDP members- some for decades, in comes Naheed Nenshi, who was not an NDP member. In fact, in the election last year in 2023, he grudgingly gave his support to the NDP. He calls himself nonpartisan. In fact, when he was mayor, he led what was called a purple revolution. That was red Liberal, blue Conservative, meshed them together. So he was saying, look, I’m not partisan, in any political party. I want to take things from the Conservatives, things from the Liberals, progressive Conservatives. And so he comes into the race as an outsider, but he is somebody who has been noted as being able to bring people together from various political parties. And the thing is what he said last year, he was supporting Rachel Notley, but he was kind of doing it begrudgingly saying, look, the NDP is not perfect. But he did it more as a protest against Danielle Smith, head of the other conservative party who was seen as being too right wing. So he said basically, I’m not keen on the NDP, but they’re better than Danielle Smith. Kind of a lukewarm endorsement. But the thing is, he’s using that now as a way to say to people, look, if you’re more moderate, but don’t belong to a political party, well listen, I didn’t either. I supported the NDP as a way of protesting against Danielle Smith. So I’m still that same person who wants to be more moderate, bring people together. And he’s using that argument as a way to try and convince other people like him to progressives who have no real home to join his leadership race, may come the leader of the party and then they can make changes.

Jordan: You mentioned that he’s a progressive, and you just mentioned he’s appealing to progressives who have no real home. I think people who maybe aren’t familiar with the Alberta NDP would wonder at that question, how is the Alberta NDP different from what someone in Toronto might imagine the NDP to be and what the NDP is federally?

Graham Thomson: Yes. That’s one of the big issues about the relationship between the Alberta NDP and the federal NDP. I’ll get to that in a second. Right now, the NDP in Alberta is not like the federal NDP at all. In fact, when Rachel Notley was the premier, she got into some public arguments, sometimes heated arguments with Jagmeet Singh, leader of the federal New Democrats, and it was over things like energy and pipelines. So in Alberta, you got the NDP kind of in an awkward position where they’re very much about protecting the environment, doing things to combat climate change. The NDP brought in a provincial carbon tax, which was not popular, but they did that as they were promoting pipelines. So when the NDP was really promoting the expansion of the Trans Mountain pipeline, Notley has talked about spending $2 billion of Alberta taxpayers’ money to kickstart that project that was stalled. This was the expansion of the Trans Mountain pipeline. It’s an existing pipeline going from Alberta to the west coast. There was plans to actually get that twinned, and it was getting really dicey. Would it move ahead or not? Notley strong armed the federal government into putting money into that pipeline, buying it, and of course it’s going to be opening pretty soon. It’s actually going to cost the federal government over 30, 3 0 billion dollars. Anyway, my point being that when she was pushing things like that, she got pushback from the federal NDP saying that we shouldn’t be promoting more oil and gas, and then she pushed back against them. So you have the NDP in Alberta being much more like a Liberal party in many ways than NDP parties in other parts of the country.

Jordan: What kind of questions does that create for this leadership race and specifically for NCIS candidacy?

Graham Thomson: Yeah, so one of the big issues coming out of it, because I think a lot of the issues like this race has become a submarine race. Not surprisingly, it’s all underground underwater, basically, he can’t see much. One of the big issues though that is splitting them is the idea of cutting formal ties with the federal NDP, because right now the constitution for the NDP is written at, if you join the Alberta NDP, you automatically become a member of the federal NDP. And that’s been a problem for the NDP Alberta. You’ve got people thinking, oh yep, I like what the NDP is doing here. They’re trying to find a balance between protecting the climate, fighting climate change, as well as promoting oil and gas. But the minute you become a member of the Alberta NDP, you become a member of the federal NDP. That’s very much fighting against building more pipelines. So what’s happening now? You got Nenshi saying, really, it’s time for us to look at cutting ties with the federal NDP. Now, this is something as an outsider, he’s talking about this, yet people who are longtime traditional NDP supporters saying, wait a minute, you can’t cut ties with the federal NDP. That’s part of who we are. We’re a big team across the country. But it’s not just Nenshi saying this, Rakhi Pancholi, she threw her support behind Nenshi as an MLA, and she is also very much in favor of cutting ties with the federal NDP and even Kathleen Ganley. Kathleen Ganley is someone who’s looking at not necessarily saying cut ties. She’s saying, I won’t close a debate on that. So you do have people inside the party saying, it’s time for us to cut ties with the federal NDP. And that’s become a bone of contention within the party. It’s not, look, this is not the kind of vicious campaign like the UCP leadership campaign two years ago when you had Danielle Smith making outrageous and controversial comments, really heated, nasty at times campaign. This is nothing like that. It’s a lot more civilized, and therefore isn’t getting as much coverage.

Jordan: But yet it seems like, if I’m hearing you correctly, kind of the future of the provincial federal relationship of this party is at stake, which theoretically at least is a big deal and could set precedent for other provinces.

Graham Thomson: Yeah, you know I wonder what will happen. Maybe they are worried if one province in a sense cuts ties with the federal NDP, what’s going to happen in the other. But in another way, the NDP in Alberta is unique because of the situation here. We have except for Saskatchewan, I guess, but Alberta is so dependent on fossil fuels for revenue. That puts the NDP, when it’s in government, into a real bind. But yes, it’s something people are talking about and it’s something that Nenshi again, when he said “last year when I supported the NDP, I did that reluctantly, but it’s time to change the NDP and bring more moderates in.” And he has Rakhi Pancholi, bright, dynamic new MLA who threw her support behind him. And that’s getting him a lot of credibility inside the NDP I would say as well because Rakhi Pancholi is really well respected. She’s only been around since 2019, so relatively new, but she’s very dynamic, very well respected. And so for her to say, we’ve got to go with Naheed Nenshi, and we’ve got to do things like cut ties with the federal NDP. That does show there’s a movement inside the party to do just that.

Jordan: You mentioned that this is kind of a submarine race, which I guess by that you mean you kind of can’t get a sense of it because it’s all happening below the surface. But what do we know about the state of the race so far, and why did you say that it’s not that surprising that we couldn’t see much of it

Graham Thomson: Because first of all, it’s the opposition, right? When you have a leadership race for a government and the person who wins will become the premier. So whatever they say during leadership race could become government policy. We saw that of course in spades when it came to Danielle Smith when she talked about a Sovereignty Act, fighting Ottawa tooth and nail, taking vengeance basically against the health authorities who brought in pandemic restrictions. So that, we’re focused on that because that person would become the premier of the province. Opposition, even though it is the biggest opposition in Alberta history, they’re still not government. But as for the actual race itself, people were pointing to Sarah Hoffman being the leader. And because Sarah Hoffman powerhouse in NDP circles in Edmonton, Edmonton is the power base of the NDP, but Naheed Nenshi turned that on his head. And when Nenshi came into the race, there was a lot of activity, but not only that, membership sales began to spike up. And Rakhi Pancholi, I talked to her a few days before she announced she was stepping down. She had no plans to step down at all. She’s was going to run and that race, and we had coffee for an hour and a half and a Friday morning. One of the questions I asked her though is that, have you seen any updated membership list? In other words, you’re all selling memberships. How is that going? She said, I don’t know how it’s going. We don’t have the numbers yet. But then a few days later, the following week, they got the numbers. That’s when Pancholi quit saying, look, in his first week or so in the race, Naheed Nenshi managed to sell double the amount of memberships in the party. Then the party had 16, that’s 1 6, 16,000 members in December of last year. And then all of a sudden they had 30,000 roughly. And Pancholi said, that’s mainly because Naheed Nenshi, and since then, Naheed Nenshi said that the party has grown to about 80, like eight zero thousand. Now we haven’t going to break down as to who’s selling the most memberships, but we do know it spiked. And you have people like Rakhi Pancholi saying, the reason we’ve got all these members joining is because of Naheed Nenshi. Now, mind you, Sarah Hoffman and Kathleen Ganley are saying, no, no, we’re selling a lot of memberships too. But it does seem to indicate that not only are a lot of people joining the party, but Naheed Nenshi is the one who is selling the most memberships. And that’s going to be key because the next important date is coming up. April 22nd, is the deadline for selling memberships. After that, you got two months until the vote in June. So the push is on the next week to get more memberships sold. And Naheed Nenshi seems to be well ahead of the others.

Jordan: I just have a couple quick questions for you before we wrap up here. I guess my first one is logistics. How does the vote actually work? I know in other provinces there’s been a lot of fighting over this and how it’s done. Is it a ranked ballot? How do they do it?

Graham Thomson: Yeah, it is, it’s a ranked ballot. So we have first, second, third, fourth, fifth choices, right? So this means that if nobody wins a majority on the first ballot and the last person drops off and their second choice goes to spread among the candidates, and they keep doing that until somebody gets a majority. In the case of the UCP leadership race, it took six ballots for Smith to win, with just 43,000. She won just over 50%. It wasn’t like a blowout. It was the small fifties over the Travis Toews, the second place person. So it’s a relatively close race that came down to the final sixth ballot. So the feeling right now for Nenshi is that because he’s an outsider, there’s a good chance that people who are voting for Sarah Hoffman, Kathleen Ganley, Jodi Calahoo Stonehouse and Gil McGowan, their second choice likely is not going to be Naheed Nenshi. It’s going to be one of the other people. So Naheed Nenshi needs to win or do exceptionally well in the very first ballot. And that goes back to selling memberships. If you can in a sense swamp the party with new members who are supporting you, like Naheed Nenshi, then you could potentially win outright on the first ballot or get so close that you’re going to win on the second or third ballot. But that’s what it’s going to come down to. And as I say, it was really close for Danielle Smith in 2022 and I came to the final ballot. We’ll see what Nenshi is doing, but again, we haven’t got the official numbers. They won’t release ’em to us. And I think even the parties themselves, like the candidates don’t really know who’s selling the most. It’s going to be a case we’ll know on June 22nd, the race is on right now to sell those memberships. That’s key, is super key right now for someone to win, especially Naheed Nenshi, he needs to flood this race, the vote with new members.

Jordan: Last question, and I want to be clear that I’m not assuming anything or looking beyond the actual votes being counted, but while I have you here, what would you be watching for if Nenshi were to lead the NDP and go up against Danielle Smith? Because that seems like a pretty dynamic clash.

Graham Thomson: Absolutely. And that’s one reason why he’s seen as a very interesting candidate to say the least, because his campaign is really about, I’m the one that can defeat Danielle Smith. The rest of them have tried. They’re part of a team that did not beat Danielle Smith. The UCP won under Kenney in 2019, won under Smith in 2023. So he is saying, look, I’m the one to beat the UCP. I am the one that can bring down Danielle Smith. And that’s what we’ll be looking for if he wins. How does he do that? And also, he won’t have a seat in the legislature. The rest of them, other than McGowan have seasonal legislature. So how’s that going to work? But the big question for Alberta is, can the NDP maintain this two-party system that we have right now with the big opposition? Because Alberta’s had a century basically of having one party in government and a very, very small opposition. The NDP at one point only had two seats in opposition to the conservatives in the past. Now they have 38 seats. And the thing is, has Alberta progressed to a two-party system? That’s the big question that won’t be answered until the next election and another three years. So there’s two questions right now. If Nenshi wins, how does he take on Smith? How does the optics of that work, the logistics of that work? And then finally next election, can he bring down the UCP and make Alberta a really two-party system? And I got to say, okay, Jordan, there’s a curse in Alberta politics, and this is not of course scientific, but basically every political party that has formed government and then lost government, that party never returns to power.

Jordan: Wow, I didn’t know that.

Graham Thomson: The Liberals in power a hundred years ago, United Farmers of Alberta, the Social credit, the Progressive Conservatives. So this is something in the background. Of course, it’s not scientific, it’s just a fact of Alberta culture, that the NDP, if they were to win again, that’d be the first time we saw a political party make a countback and come back into power.

Jordan: Graham, that’s fascinating. This should be a fascinating leadership race, and it’d be interesting to see the future of the provincial federal NDP relations. Thanks so much.

Graham Thomson: It’s been my pleasure.

Jordan: That was Graham Thompson, and that was The Big Story. For more, you can head to The Big Story podcast.ca, and if you want to leave us feedback, you can do it by emailing us hello at The Big Story podcast.ca or by just giving us a call 416-935-5935. You can tell all of us here in Ontario how little we know about Alberta. Seriously though, we appreciate all feedback, criticism, or praise, or even just suggestions for what we should cover next. The Big Story’s available in every single podcast player, and it’s on your smart speaker. Just ask it to play The Big Story podcast. Thanks for listening. I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings. We’ll talk tomorrow.