Alberta NDP Leader Rachel Notley gave a rip-roaring speech to the party faithful in Edmonton Saturday, but a consensus is emerging among the commentariat and many voters that the Opposition party’s communications strategy is failing and time is short to fix it.
The same day, veteran political commentator Charles Adler, a conservative who has grown disillusioned with the extremist direction taken by Canada’s conservative parties in recent years, took to social media to note polls predicting a United Conservative Party (UCP) majority in Alberta’s May election are probably right.
“No surprise,” Adler observed tartly. “Danielle Smith’s comms team ruthless & relentless. Rachel Notley’s comms team Lugubrious & Lethargic.”
It may have been a surprise to some readers that a frustrated Brian Mason, leader of the Alberta NDP from 2004 to 2014, immediately noted his agreement.
“I couldn’t agree more,” Mason tweeted soon after. “If the NDP doesn’t up its comms game immediately, they will lose the election in May. There’s too much at stake to keep fumbling around. Clearly, they need outside help.” (It was Mason who said that, by the way, although he has been reduced to tweeting from @bmasonNDP2 since encountering problems with his original @bmasonNDP Twitter account a few weeks ago.)
“I don’t think there’s a coherent NDP communications strategy,” Mason told me from his retirement home in British Columbia’s Okanagan Valley. “I’m getting very nervous. They’re showing no signs of an effective communications strategy in the lead-up to the election.”
“You have to define your opponent clearly,” he added, noting that the UCP’s communications staff has been quite successful at putting most of the truly outrageous statements by Premier Smith behind them.
READ MORE: Notley vows reinvestment in health and education in nomination speech
By contrast, Mason said, “Rachel is one of the NDP’s best assets. She is seen as competent and is well liked. Contrasting her with Smith, who is seen as more extreme and increasingly dishonest, is an obvious comms tactic.
“I’d like the NDP to hit that one hard,” said Mason.
But “the NDP’s focus is all over the place,” Mason continued. “They need to define three or four issues that will move the vote we need to move, and hammer them home repeatedly.”
An example, perhaps, is the “A Better Future for Alberta” signs hoisted by party supporters at Notley’s nomination meeting in Edmonton Saturday.
Readers will recall that Jason Kenney’s successful slogan – “Jobs, Economy, Pipelines” – was repeated relentlessly. As a political message it was powerful and effective, at once defining the newly created UCP as being for those things, and by false but persuasive implication, the NDP as against them, or at least hopelessly ineffective at making progress on those files.
So, it’s said here, that “Jobs, Healthcare, Education,” would be a more effective NDP catchphrase than “A Better Future,” better though the future might be under Notley’s leadership.
Read the comments on yesterday’s post on this blog, and you’ll see the same thoughts are in the minds of AlbertaPolitics.ca readers.
“As an NDP supporter I am underwhelmed by what I have seen so far in the party’s public offerings,” says one comment. “To me, the NDP is in a fight for its life as a party and for the future of the province. I find their communications and their strategies so far uninspiring and low key.”
Says another: “At the moment, the worst issue facing Notley and the NDP is themselves. The messaging seems to be off. … None have hammered home the reality that Smith intends to withdraw every single spending initiative (the UCP) reluctantly presented in their last budget.”
Not only is the NDP’s milquetoast messaging coming under fire for its lack of fire, but despite the party’s $7.2-million war chest from record-breaking donations it’s been slow off the mark with the tough campaign required for a non-conservative party to win against Alberta’s skewed electoral math, where conservative rural ridings hold disproportionate power.
“The whole idea you can wait till the writ dropped to spend any money makes no sense to me,” Mason told me. “You really have to start early!”
“You need to start well before the official campaign to convince people of what your message is,” he explained, and despite raising more money than it ever has before, the NDP has been keeping its powder dry even though the shooting from the other side has already started, setting the UCP’s narrative in the minds of many voters.
Former Progressive Conservative deputy premier Thomas Lukaszuk, a fierce NDP opponent during the 14 years he was MLA for Edmonton-Castle Downs, shares Mason’s fears about the damage Premier Smith will do to Alberta if she is given a four-year mandate.
Lukaszuk said he believes many Progressive Conservatives like himself can be persuaded to vote for the NDP because the prospect of four years of Danielle Smith as premier is so dire, and because NDP Leader Rachel Notley was “a very pragmatic premier” between 2015 and 2019.
Out of politics since he was defeated by the NDP’s Nicole Goehring in 2015, Lukaszuk says “I think I am not the only PC looking at this election knowing there are only two options. And PCs willing to be objective will have a hard time voting for the UCP.”
But to win over those Progressive Conservative voters, Mason’s former rival told me, “the NDP really needs to lay out its policy and convince voters that they are the rational choice.”
“The NDP needs to have a professionally managed communications campaign that personalizes their policies and shows Albertans what the impact of their policies versus UCP policies would be.”
And that needs to start now, he added. “I don’t think it’s too late, although it’s getting to be extremely late.”
Whether many other Progressive Conservatives are willing to publicly back the pragmatic leadership of Notley, as Lukaszuk hopes, remains to be seen.
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