Here comes Naheed Nenshi
He’s the candidate NDP activists will loathe and NDP voters will love.
The countdown is on.
Former Calgary mayor Naheed Nenshi is set to enter the Alberta NDP leadership race on Monday, March 11.
Nenshi hasn’t publicly said he’s interested in the race. He’s been busy promoting the novel Denison Avenue by Christina Wong and Daniel Innes on CBC Radio’s Canada Reads 2024 this week. Instead, his intentions are being telegraphed through political back channels.
Nenshi left office in 2021 after 11 years as mayor of Alberta’s largest city and barely skipped a beat before jumping back into the punditry that helped vault him into the mayor’s office in the first place. He’s thoughtful, well-spoken, entertaining, and thrives in the political fray. He’s a champion of civic engagement and was named the World’s Best Mayor in 2014.
Nenshi is Mister Calgary
There’s an argument that a post-Rachel Notley NDP desperately needs a leader from Calgary to build on the party’s success in the last election. That May 2023 vote saw the NDP jump from 3 to 14 MLAs and win more votes in Calgary than the United Conservative Party. It wasn’t enough to defeat Danielle Smith’s UCP but it was close.
Winning in Calgary doesn’t come naturally for the NDP. With the majority of the party’s seats in Edmonton, the NDP has deep roots in the capital city going back to the 1980s. In fact, every NDP leader since 1984 has been from Edmonton.
It took four years of concerted effort by Notley, who basically made Calgary her second home, and the recruitment of slate of candidates that moderate conservative voters would be comfortable voting for. The NDP’s rebrand even included a new logo that inserted a little bit more blue into the party’s colour palette. They were trying to position themselves as the new Progressive Conservatives and it almost worked.
Nenshi, some say, is the only potential candidate with the profile, popularity and skill to win wide support in Calgary. He’s not only a Calgary figure but someone with name recognition and profile across Alberta and Canada. In today’s hyper-centric-leader-focused political environment, there’s no other candidate in the race with Nenshi’s profile.
A poll conducted by Dan Arnold at Pollara last month showed 70 percent of Albertans who have an NDP membership or are likely to buy one felt excited or comfortable with Nenshi.
But name recognition can cut both ways. Higher name recognition comes with both higher positive and negative perceptions than any of the other candidates in the NDP leadership race.
And while the civic rivalry between the two cities that dominated the 1980s and 1990s is now largely relegated to the history books, it remains to be seen how much political capital a former Calgary mayor has in Edmonton. The NDP need to grow in Calgary if they want to form government in 2027 but they also need to hold on to all their seats in Edmonton.
Nenshi’s entry into the race will create waves and likely cause a lot of frustration for leadership candidate and former justice minister Kathleen Ganley. One of the MLA for Calgary-Mountain View’s big pitches to NDP members is that the party needs a leader from Calgary and she’s from Calgary.
Well, you can’t get more Calgary than Nenshi. He’s Mister Calgary.
Making Purple Waves
Ganley responded to news of Nenshi’s impending entry into the race by calling his endorsement of the NDP in 2023 “the most tepid endorsement that has ever existed.”
Calgary-Edgemont MLA Julia Hayter wrote in a fundraising email for Ganley’s campaign on Wednesday that “Nenshi is talented. But he’s never been part of our team.”
It’s true that Nenshi will be new to the NDP. He built a popular political brand in Calgary during his time in the mayor’s office by not being aligned with a political party.
The political lore tells us that Nenshi’s campaign chose to embrace the colour purple in his first election because it wasn’t being used by any political party and it was a combination of Liberal red and Conservative blue (interestingly, purple was the colour used by the Alberta NDP from the mid-1980s until 2004).
He’s not a long-time NDP member like Ganley and Sarah Hoffman, or even Rakhi Pancholi who joined the party in 2018, and he’s going to have to appeal the party’s Leadership Race Approvals Committee to be allowed into the race. But a lot of people who voted NDP in 2023 were new to the party as well.
Ganley’s and Hayter’s arguments might work when speaking one-to-one with established party members, but are considerably less effective when it is broadcast to a wide audience online.
Nenshi jumping into the race will tweak the noses of many long-time NDP activists who aren’t accustomed to a big name outsider wanting to lead their party. The most recent Alberta NDP leaders - Notley, Mason, Barrett, Harvey, Martin and Notley - were longtime figures inside the party.
While many NDP activists continue to embrace the party’s social democratic roots, the NDP tent is much bigger today than it was when Rachel Notley became leader in 2014. The coalition Notley built is filled with people who were recently members and supporters of other parties, including the Liberals, Progressive Conservatives and Alberta Party.
In that respect, Nenshi might be the leadership candidate many NDP activists will loathe and many NDP voters will love.
The Outsider
Being such a big personality does have some drawbacks.
During his time as mayor Nenshi wasn’t exactly known for fostering good working relationships with some of his fellow council members. He can be prickly. A big part of being a leader is managing a party and a caucus.
Notley navigated the NDP through nine tumultuous years in Alberta politics and through almost the entire journey she maintained lock-solid discipline over the party and caucus. Not once did anyone in a position to do anything about it call her for to resign as leader after the party lost in 2019 or 2023. It spoke to her political skills and the deep respect many NDP members had for her.
If Nenshi wins the NDP leadership on June 22, he will lead a caucus of 38 MLAs, including many who have been around since the party’s first breakthrough in 2015 and others who will have endorsed other leadership candidates. Some of these MLAs might still be a little sore that he waited until 2023 to lend the party a hand.
This isn’t insurmountable. He’d have the disadvantage of initially not having a seat in the Legislature, but he would need to strongly commit to working with the NDP’s 38 MLAs by demonstrating that they play an important role in a Nenshi New Democratic Party.
But that’s me putting the cart way before the horse. Nenshi still needs to win the leadership race for any of that to happen.
For the first time, the modern Alberta NDP finds itself divided into camps and faces the prospect of a high-profile outsider becoming a frontrunner in its leadership race. It’s a sign of maturity for an Alberta NDP that has become a big tent centre-leftish party.
Nenshi will be the immediate frontrunner the minute he enters the race on March 11 but the big question is whether his campaign can sell enough memberships to win. When he announces on Monday, he will only have 6 weeks until the April 22 deadline for new members to sign up. It’s a very tight timeline but if there is anyone who can generate excitement and interest in this race, it’s him.
Get ready. Here comes Naheed Nenshi.
Nenshi won’t be the first former Calgary mayor to jump into a provincial party leadership race:
Ralph Klein, mayor from 1980 to 1988, used the successful 1988 Olympics as a springboard into provincial politics and was Premier of Alberta and leader of the Progressive Conservative Party from 1992 to 2006.
Rod Sykes, mayor from 1969 to 1977, briefly led the Social Credit Party from 1980 to 1982. He resigned before the 1982 election and never ran in a provincial election.
Andrew Davison, mayor from 1930 to 1944, served concurrently as an MLA and leader of the “Unity Movement” in the 1940s.
Labour leader Gil McGowan enters the NDP race
Alberta Federation of Labour President Gil McGowan announced on Twitter that he has officially registered with Elections Alberta as an NDP leadership candidate and is now collecting signatures from party members to enter the race.
McGowan is a longtime party activist, having run federally for the NDP in 2015 and for provincial nominations ahead of the 1997 and 2001 elections. He’s a well-known figure in Alberta politics and over the past year he has become one of the most vocal critics against the UCP government’s plans to withdraw from the Canada Pension Plan.
“I was elected to serve the interests of Alberta workers from AFL-affiliated unions and I intend to continue doing that throughout this spring,” McGowan posted on social media in response to calls by Lac Ste. Anne-Parkland MLA Shane Getson that he resign as AFL President. “I want to make it very clear that I will NOT be using any labour movement resources for my leadership bid.”
McGowan is currently recovering from COVID-19 and said he will soon formally launch his leadership campaign soon at events in Edmonton and Calgary.
Thank you
Thank you for reading today’s Daveberta column!
I’m happy to share today’s Alberta politics column for free with the more than 3,650 subscribers (!) who have signed up on Substack. If you want full access to all Daveberta columns and episodes of the Daveberta Podcast, please consider signing up for a paid subscription.
In case you missed them, be sure to read my recent column about how the Heritage Savings Trust Fund was formed and listen to this week’s podcast interview with NDP leadership candidate Sarah Hoffman.
You might also be interested in revisiting the Daveberta Podcast interview with Nenshi from February 2023.
Thanks again,
Dave
Readers of this post might also be interested in listening to Nenshi’s interview on the Daveberta Podcast: https://daveberta.substack.com/p/why-naheed-nenshi-is-running-for
I'm interested in what Naheed Nenshi would have to say to Northern Alberta, further north than Edmonton, specifically.