Vowing to reinvest in education, make “bold reforms” necessary to fix health care, and put an end to plans to fire the RCMP and gamble with Albertans’ pensions, NDP Leader Rachel Notley accepted the nomination for her Edmonton-Strathcona riding Saturday.
More than 1,000 people packed the atrium of the Productivity and Innovation Centre at the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology in Edmonton to lustily cheer Notley’s nomination – and her nominators, Raj Pannu, who served as Edmonton-Strathcona’s MLA from 1997 to his retirement in 2008, and seconder Jodi Calahoo Stonehouse, the party’s candidate in Edmonton-Rutherford.
Many of the party’s candidates from throughout Alberta were on the stage as well.
By any measure, it was a rousing speech suitable for the start of an election campaign in which, as Notley put it, “the choice in front of Albertans as we head into this election is stark.”
She excoriated Premier Danielle Smith and the record of the United Conservative Party (UCP).
“Instead of demonizing teachers, firing educational assistants, cutting supports from vulnerable students, and forcing them to learn the most backwards curriculum in 50 years,” she promised, an NDP government would reinvest in classrooms, hire more teachers and educational assistants, and write a better school curriculum than the almost universally criticized version introduced by the UCP.
And “instead of letting costs for families run out of control like the UCP did when they gave the big car insurance companies permission to jack up your premiums, or when they put in fake relief for the utility prices they allowed to go up, relief that you have to pay back when the polls close, we will do better.
“We will get your insurance costs under control, we will deal with skyrocketing utility rates to bring your costs down now and long after the election,” she said – sometimes barely audible over the cheers from the crowd.
“Instead of multibillion-dollar handouts for big corporations, Alberta’s NDP will set the policies that draw new investment and create the jobs of the future,” she continued.
“None of this ‘RStar’ free cash for Danielle Smith’s donors who don’t want to clean up after themselves,” she said. “We will lead our energy industry into the future.”
“Instead of fighting with health care workers and making Albertans pay more for their health care, even as it becomes harder to access, we will make the bold reforms necessary to ensure another million Albertans have access to doctors and family health teams,” Notley said. “Because we know that better health care starts with better primary care. It starts in the doctor’s office.”
“And friends, speaking of health care, only Danielle Smith could look at what’s going on around her and still try to tell Albertans, ‘the crisis is over’! The crisis, over? Seriously? I dare her to look in the eyes of the nurses and support workers on their second mandatory overtime shift, nearing collapse, and tell them the crisis over,” Notley went on to say.
“The truth is,” she added, “Danielle Smith doesn’t have the answers because she’s never spoken to those Albertans … who know what really matters.” How else, she asked, can we explain unpopular UCP schemes like replacing the RCMP with a provincial police force or eliminating the Canada Pension Plan?
“They won’t say it out loud, but the UCP braintrust is absolutely coming for your pension,” Notley stated. “But, my friends, know this: Alberta’s NDP will be there and we will never let the UCP or Danielle Smith get their hands on it.”
It’s hard to argue with Notley when she says that “when the UCP’s primary campaign strategy is to keep their leader away from the microphone, that’s how you know that you cannot trust her or her party to run this province.
“On all the issues that matter to Albertans in this election – health care, education, affordability, jobs – Danielle Smith is the wrong person to tackle them,” she said.
Notley described the moment after the NDP’s election loss in 2019 when she decided to stay on as party leader and fight the serial reversal of NDP policies wrought by the UCP, including the right of students to form Gay-Straight Alliances in their schools. The UCP legislation that removed that right was known as Bill 8.
Said Notley: “It was in the middle of the summer of 2019, not long after the election, when every single UCP MLA, giddy with excitement, walked down the front steps of the Legislature and started splashing around in the fountains as if they were the cast of Friends!”
The photo appeared on the screen behind her.
“Looks like they’re having fun, right? Folks, let me tell you, these are the faces of the UCP about 30 minutes after they passed ‘Bill Hate’ and removed the right for kids to form a GSA at school,” Notley said. “This is how your UCP Government celebrated the decision to end protections against bullying for children who just needed a place to feel safe! And, my friends, that lit a fire in me!”
Albertans are better than this, Notley asserted, and “New Democrat values are Alberta values …”
New Democrats, she said, believe “that public education is the great equalizer. “And that public health care is something to be cherished, improved, and protected, at all cost. “That in a fair and prosperous economy, every single worker deserves fair pay, fair benefits, a safe workplace and fair representation.” (None of the dire predictions about the $15 minimum wage introduced by the NDP came true, she noted.)
“And, finally, we believe in respect for the dignity and human rights that each and every one of us was born with. Those are our values, and those are Alberta values,” Notley concluded.
NOTE: Click here to hear my recording of Notley’s nomination acceptance speech. Sound quality is imperfect and applause at times makes it difficult to hear what she is saying. Nevertheless, most of it is there. DJC
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