So what’s next for Rachel Notley?
The buzz grows louder by the day that, sooner than later, Notley is going to move on from her present role as Alberta’s Opposition leader.
Gossip is hinting at sometime early in the new year, possibly January.
As for Notley herself and her inner circle, they’re playing it close to their vests. For now.
It’s unusual for a party leader who has just lost an election on which many supporters had pinned their hopes. But there is no clamour within the NDP Caucus or most of the party for Notley to go.
Oh sure, there are few cranky voices, mostly associated with the leftward reaches of the party, nowadays a definite minority, who express bitterness about the strategy the NDP adopted in the 2023 election campaign.
But really, caucus members and party supporters alike wonder, who else is there?
Indeed, a lot of time is spent in NDP circles nowadays quietly ruminating about who else there is, whether or not they’d run for the leadership, and how much they’d mess it up if they got it.
Bringing Alberta’s NDP out of the shadows
To a remarkable degree, Notley has rebuilt the party in her own image since she became leader in October 2014 – that is to say, progressive, but also quite conservative in a small-c, lawyerly sort of way.
Lose in 2019 and 2023 though her party did, she brought it to government in 2015 – something no one expected, until about two weeks before the vote on May 5 that year. That includes Notley and the NDP themselves – for which Noteley is still honoured, even loved, in Alberta NDP circles.
In Edmonton, the NDP has become a well-oiled machine, painting the town solid orange in provincial politics. In Calgary, not so much. United Conservative Party Premier Danielle Smith only had to appear reasonable in one short debate, it would seem, to scrape up another Conservative victory, although surely many Albertans are now suffering buyer’s remorse.
As for rural Alberta, it is utter darkness for the NDP – probably for all of eternity. Never mind what’s the matter with Kansas. What’s the matter with Red Deer?
The thing is, you need two out of those three to win the Legislature in Alberta. While the NDP gained ground in Calgary, it couldn’t gain enough. Close may count in more recreational activities than horseshoes and hand grenades, but politics isn’t one of them.
The end of a career, or the beginning?
So what’s left for Rachel Notley to do? She’s only 59 and astoundingly fit. She remains as sharp as the proverbial tack.
Right now, according to her husband’s social media pages, she’s taking a break at a lake in BC. She looks very relaxed. Thinking about retirement? Thinking about something else? Or just chillin’ in the Kootenays?
Andrew Traynor has an idea.
“Rachel Notley could win basically any seat in Edmonton if she ran federally. Edmonton-Centre is particularly winnable for a New Democrat,” Traynor, known on Twitter as Robert Andrew Francis, tweeted Tuesday. “It’s likely this is the last Federal election with the current NDP & LPC leaders.”
You may ask: Just who is this Andrew Traynor? The short answer is he’s an articling student at law with an Edmonton legal firm.
But he’s had a long involvement in NDP politics. I fondly remember the day in 2012 he and a few others met in my living room in St. Albert and formally re-established an NDP constituency association in the riding. Soon, he was president of the constituency association.
It seemed a bit like tilting at a windmill at the time. But who knew there’d be an NDP government in less than three years, and that St. Albert would be represented by a good New Democrat MLA, Marie Renaud, ever since?
So I give Traynor some credit for good political instincts, and his tweet prompted these musings.
“After three campaigns for government and even more as MLA, it’s totally fair to decide to pack it in and cap off a legendary career,” he went on. “But there *is* a potential path to Prime Minister Rachel Notley.”
Now that may seem unlikely to you. As Traynor admitted, he was just “throwing it out there with a massive grain of salt.”
Federal NDP in need of a strong leader
Still, think about it.
After almost a decade, the country sure feels like it’s had enough of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. But despite recent bad polls, he still might win in a year or two. As veteran political commentator Michael Harris put it on Tuesday in The Tyee, “there are few things less relevant than a mid-summer poll with no election in sight.”
And it would seem that, for every Canadian who can’t stand the PM, there’s one who finds Conservative Opposition Leader Pierre Poilievre repellent. As Harris pointed out, the Conservatives’ record in office is even worse than that of the Liberals.
For Canadians who couldn’t abide the Conservatives and felt no love for the Liberals, the natural place to turn in May 2011 was the NDP, led by Jack Layton. It nearly worked. Had Layton survived, he might well have been prime minister soon enough.
After Layton’s death, the party chose Thomas Mulcair, perhaps the most effective federal Opposition leader of the modern era, but too Liberal, it would seem, for many NDP activists.
The best that can be said about their successor, Jagmeet Singh, is that he has been underwhelming. And what kind of an alternative is an NDP that supports the Liberals at every turn and keeps their government afloat? That strategy has its proponents. But at this point, it’s turning into not much more than an effective talking point for angry Conservatives.
And where did the NDP gain a seat in the last federal election in 2021? In Edmonton – a victory, arguably, that the federal party owes more to Notley than to Singh.
One way or another, the NDP risks a drubbing in the next federal election – probably at the hands of the Liberals. Voters who abhor the Conservatives will hold their noses and vote for Trudeau’s party.
But considerable numbers of NDP voters in Western Canada could hold their noses and vote for Poilievre as well – it’s happened before, in 1993 and 1997, when anti-establishment New Democrats in the West voted for Preston Manning’s Reform Party.
To be blunt, if the national NDP is going to survive, it needs a leader stronger than Singh.
Who, in Opposition, would be more like Mulcair than Notley?
And who would be more like Layton in the minds of Canadian voters than Notley?
And wouldn’t it be nice to see former Alberta Premier Jason Kenney’s dream come true that, finally, the premiership of Alberta could be a stepping stone to the Prime Minister’s Office? Only just not for him.
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Nick Seebruch, editor
