Has Naheed Nenshi just had his reverse chicken salad moment?
It was future U.S. president Lyndon B. Johnson, then the Senate Majority leader, who astutely observed of Richard Nixon in 1958 that “in politics you’ve got to learn that, overnight, chicken shit can turn to chicken salad!”
Of course, the transformation can occur in reverse as well, as Nenshi, who until earlier this week at least was the clear frontrunner in the race to replace Rachel Notley as leader of the Alberta NDP, may have just discovered.
Or maybe not. But whatever the answer is, it will tell a lot about the kind of party the NDP has become during Notley’s decade at the party’s helm.
Nenshi had to contend with the leak to The Canadian Press of a letter he wrote as mayor of Calgary in 2019 asking the newly elected United Conservative Party (UCP) government of then-premier Jason Kenney to help out a city scheme to privatize public services by allowing the new owners to ignore the employees’ successor rights to their collective agreements.
The revelation of the letter to Labour Minister Jason Copping, signed by Nenshi, immediately prompted a flurry of sharp attacks by the other candidates to lead the Opposition party.
Alberta Federation of Labour President Gil McGowan, who has been running an aggressive campaign but is not considered by most pundits to be a likely winner, was particularly pugnacious in his response.
“No New Democrat I know would have ever signed a letter like that,” McGowan tweeted. “This is serious.”
“I was hoping that Naheed would apologize and say it was a mistake,” he continued in another tweet. “But he hasn’t done that. As the elected leader of Alberta’s largest worker organization, I’m very disappointed. And very concerned.”
Speaking to Canadian Press reporter Lisa Johnson, McGowan called the revelation “a pretty serious concern to be raised about someone who is running to lead what is, or at least was, the workers’ party.” (Emphasis added.)
Kathleen Ganley, the former NDP Justice Minister seen as the frontrunner until Nenshi joined the race on March 11, said on social media “I am deeply disturbed by the letter from former Mayor Nenshi that attempts to squirm out of a deal that he made with city workers. It also tries to change the rules around when the city can privatize a service.”
“The next premier of this province will be responsible for bargaining with hundreds of thousands of workers, including nurses and teachers,” she continued. “These professionals deserve to feel like they are negotiating with someone who respects their rights and will keep their word.”
Candidates Sarah Hoffman and Jodi Calahoo Stonehouse made similar points. “To sign your name to a letter that says that you were asking the government to do something that is counter to your values isn’t leadership,” Hoffman said.
Instead of apologizing for what he might have dismissed as a mere mistake, Nenshi’s response seemed slippery. “I never believed in it, and I did it because council asked me to do it,” he told Canadian Press. “I believe that collective agreements and collective bargaining rights are incredibly important.”
This would be easy to slough off if Nenshi were a candidate vying to lead another progressive party, say, the Liberals. But for the NDP, founded as a party of labour, perhaps not so much.
But many Albertans who may not be traditional New Democrats have been attracted to the big tent erected by Notley and are desperate to see Premier Danielle Smith and the UCP gone for good in 2027 have chosen Nenshi as the candidate most likely to be able to win the next election.
To many of them, signed up by Nenshi himself and his supporters, this is not likely to be a ballot question, if they care at all.
For traditional New Democrats, steeped in the party’s labour tradition, it will be a harder pill to swallow. Nor is privatization considered a virtue in NDP circles.
Will that be enough to knock Nenshi out of the race? Probably not. Candidates with momentum tend to survive such flaps.
But it does mean he’ll have some fences to mend with the party’s labour traditionalists, and if the outcome turns out not to be the coronation that most observers have been expecting, it may limit his scope of action as NDP leader. Given the tendencies suggested by his 2019 letter, that might not be a bad thing.
He’ll also need to come up with a better explanation than city council made me do it!
Look for Nenshi to remind voters about the raise of 12.5 per cent over four years Calgary civic workers negotiated when he was mayor in 2014, compared with what public sector workers like teachers and nurses got when Notley was premier in 2017 and 2018.
One interesting question remains: Who leaked the letter?
As McGowan observed when someone accused him of doing it, the most likely suspect is Smith’s UCP. “Who else,” he asked, “would have access to this private correspondence between a mayor and the UCP minister of labour?”
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Nick Seebruch, editor
