New NDP Leader Naheed Nenshi and outgoing Opposition Leader Rachel Notley at Saturday afternoon’s announcement of the party’s leadership race results in Calgary.
New NDP Leader Naheed Nenshi and outgoing Opposition Leader Rachel Notley at Saturday afternoon’s announcement of the party’s leadership race results in Calgary. Credit: Rachel Notley Credit: Rachel Notley

The Alberta NDP isn’t the same party today it was last week. 

Not after former Calgary mayor Naheed Nenshi’s crushing 86-per cent victory in the race to replace former premier Rachel Notley as leader of the provincial NDP. That’s practically unanimous! 

Consider the tally: 

Naheed Nenshi – 62,746, 86 per cent
Kathleen Ganley – 5,899, eight per cent
Sarah Hoffman – 3,063, four per cent
Jodi Calahoo Stonehouse – 1,222, two per cent

A total of 72,930 of the NDP’s recently expanded membership of 85,277 voted, a turnout of 85.6 per cent. 

Say what you will, you just can’t argue with numbers like that. 

So it really is just like those right-wing columnists kept warning New Democrats would happen! 

But why did the pundits even care? It’s not as if many of them are going to vote NDP, is it? They cared, of course, because they see that an Alberta NDP led by Nenshi might just be able to beat the United Conservative Party (UCP) – no matter who leads it.

That was something the old NDP, the one led by Rachel Notley until Saturday, was apparently no longer capable of doing. 

Let’s face it, if Notley’s version of the NDP couldn’t defeat the UCP led in 2023 by Danielle Smith, a leader so irresponsible she is basically bonkers, what chance would it have had against any of Smith’s rivals to replace Jason Kenney after the party he founded turned on him? 

Colourless Travis Toews would certainly have done better than Smith did. Brian Jean, the living definition of a spavined political hack, would probably have done better too. Even poor old Kenney himself, against whom the NDP had hoped and expected to campaign, likely could have improved on Smith’s shallow win.

Notley acknowledged as much when she announced on January 16 she would step down as soon as a new leader was chosen.

So beating any Conservative leader – not just Smith – is important, because the UCP won’t hesitate to skid Smith too, just like they skidded Jason Kenney, if she starts to look like a loser.

New Democrats obviously wanted to replace Notley with a leader with a track record – three fights against Conservative candidates for Calgary’s City Hall – and flexible enough to pivot to deal with any opponent. 

And that was no doubt why the commentariat and the UCP have slyly tried to leave the impression with NDP voters that if they were real New Democrats they could never tolerate Nenshi, 52, who only recently joined the party and has a history of political non-partisanship. 

He would change their party into something different, they warned. He might even, God forbid, sever their ties with the federal NDP of Jagmeet Singh!

Could be true, I guess. But did Alberta New Democrats care if Nenshi had a reputation as a centrist? Apparently not that much – as long as he was a centrist who displayed a willingness to fight the UCP. 

Did they care if right-wing commentators yelled at them that the New Democratic Party is about to become Nenshi Democratic Party? Evidently they weren’t bothered by that either.

Did Alberta NDPers – old and new – live and die to be tied to the federal NDP, something Nenshi said he might reconsider? No to that one too. 

Well, the UCP and its tame media are going to have to come up with something better if they want to split the NDP, Wildrose style, into factions.

With the level of unanimity demonstrated by the vote results published Saturday – ballots cast by new members and old-timey Dippers alike  – there’s basically zero chance of an internal NDP rift until after the next general election. 

Given that, under Premier Smith, the UCP may well instinctively switch back to screeching about Commies, the World Economic Forum, and COVID vaccine conspiracies until the professionals from the federal Conservatives return to Alberta in 2027 to try to pull the fat out of the fire for them like they did last year. 

If Nenshi manages to lose it in 2027, of course, all bets are off. That said, he doesn’t seem like the type of guy who would stick around for long anyway in such circumstances. 

Meanwhile, though, the Alberta NDP is his party for the foreseeable future, and he can adopt any strategy he sees fit to win the next election. 

While Nenshi will say many kind things about Notley’s years at the head of the party – most of them well deserved – it’s unlikely he will stick with the oh-so-agreeably passive strategy and lack of message control that failed the NDP in 2019 in the face of the Jason Kenney juggernaut and failed it again in 2023 against the far less formidable Smith.

Obviously NDP members and many more NDP-leaning voters who didn’t participate in the leadership election have decided Premier Smith and all of her troubling baggage – Take Back Alberta, MAGA warrior David Parker, the UCP anti-vaccination caucus, COVID quackery, the would-be pension grab, health care privatization, outright separatism, and so on – are just too crazy ever to form a rational government.

So if Nenshi is the only person who knows how to campaign against any party in Alberta that calls itself conservative, no matter how unconservative it may be, the vote shows decisively NDP members have concluded, so be it! 

Saturday afternoon in his victory speech in Calgary, Nenshi came out swinging. 

The UCP vision of Alberta is a small one, he said: “… An Alberta that is so very, very small … where everyone is against us … where we need to fight outsiders all the time. An Alberta where we should be scared of change, instead of embracing and leading the future. That is not Alberta!”

“Danielle Smith and the UCP want us to be small,” he continued. “They want us to be small because they think small. They see Alberta as a fortress to be defended. But what Alberta has always been is a wide open door with a welcome mat, inviting the best people and the best ideas from every corner of this broken earth to live a great Alberta life right here!”

Then he turned to Premier Smith’s claim to be “the most freedom-loving politician in Canada.”

“She hasn’t done a blessed thing to protect anybody’s freedoms! In fact, what she does, is she systematically takes them away,” he said. A long list followed. 

“Albertans have shown over and over and over and over and over again that we are better than our premier,” Nenshi said. “That we are better than her government. And this extraordinary movement that we’ve created together is an example of what is possible when you stop thinking small!”

As for those angry Calgary sprawl caballers who Canada’s first Muslim big-city mayor defeated three times at City Hall but who boast they know all Nenshi’s weak spots, it sure sounds like they’re whistling past the graveyard. 

We’ll see, I guess. In the meantime, though, Nenshi’s record in civic government would seem like a better angle of attack than calling a former business professor a commie, but it’s not for me to tell the UCP their business. 

As for the NDP insiders and political technocrats who failed to eke out a victory last year, and who coalesced around the campaign of former justice minister Kathleen Ganley hoping to ensure more of the same, this is a crushing defeat. 

For good or ill, with a vote like this there is no way that Notley’s former strategic brain trust can direct Nenshi as they might have been able to do with a former member of the former premier’s cabinet.

If Nenshi decides to keep any of the party’s previous political advisors around, it will be a strategic move to ensure peace in the valley, not an endorsement of their tactics. 

Unlike the disgruntled base of the UCP grumbling that teachers, nurses, union members and other “infiltrators” stole the leadership from Ted Morton in 2011, no former NDP insider can moan that they were robbed in 2024.

As of last night, pretty well the entire party membership has gone over en masse and united behind Nenshi. 

Alberta Federation of Labour President Gil McGowan, who dropped out of the race on May 13 pleading a lack of funds, now looks as if he made a prudent call.

So, what’s next? 

Well, don’t expect Nenshi, the only candidate in the vote who was not a sitting MLA, to hurry to run in Lethbridge West, where a seat is about to be open thanks to former NDP environment minister Shannon Phillips’ planned resignation. 

Remember, after winning the leadership of the UCP in October 2022, Smith could have chosen to run in Calgary-Elbow, left open a month earlier when her justice minister quit. Instead, she waited for a compliant MLA to step aside in Brooks Medicine Hat, so she could win easily in a rural seat safe for the UCP.

Nenshi will likely follow her example and wait until he can run in a safe Calgary riding and win by a decisive margin there too. 

So job No. 1 for the NDP, starting tomorrow, will be figuring out who will lead the party in the Legislature while the new leader travels the province, schmoozing voters – although probably not in a big purple pickup truck. 

Look for Edmonton-Whitemud MLA Rakhi Pancholi, who dropped out of the race on March 26 and endorsed Nenshi, to capably fill a key role in the House.

David J. Climenhaga

David J. Climenhaga

David Climenhaga is a journalist and trade union communicator who has worked in senior writing and editing positions with the Globe and Mail and the Calgary Herald. He left journalism after the strike...