Janis Irwin voted Best Alberta MLA for fourth year in a row
Advanced Education minister Rajan Sawhney voted best cabinet minister
With thousands of submissions and votes cast over the past two weeks, the winners of the Best of Alberta Politics 2023 Survey have been selected.
Best Alberta MLA: Janis Irwin
Always a fan favourite, for the fourth year in a row Edmonton-Highlands-Norwood MLA Janis Irwin has been voted the Best Alberta MLA.
A savvy communicator, Irwin (and her internet famous cat, Oregano) has a huge social media following and is widely considered one of the hardest working constituency MLAs in the province.
Her reputation has led to invites to speak at NDP conventions across the country, including at the recent federal NDP convention in Hamilton and the BC NDP convention in Victoria.
After Irwin was re-elected to a second term last May, she took on a new role as housing critic in the expanded 38-MLA official opposition caucus, which has placed her on the forefront of one of the biggest political issues of the year.
“Across the province, I hear from single parents, young professionals, seniors, students and dual-income families who are struggling to afford 20, 30, even 50 per cent increases to their rent,” Irwin recently wrote in the Calgary Herald.
Responding to the huge spike in rental costs in Alberta, she introduced Bill 205: Housing Statutes (Housing Security) Amendment Act, 2023, which would establish a two-year temporary rental cap at 2 per cent, followed by a two-year rental cap tied to inflation, and increase reporting requirements to ensure the government is meeting its intended housing targets.
“Everyone deserves a place to call home,” Irwin said at the press conference announcing the private member’s bill. “However, many Albertans are experiencing the impacts of the housing crisis, reflected in the steep increases to rental costs across the province.”
Just this past week she walked the talk on housing when she spoke compassionately against the Edmonton Police Service’s plans to forcibly decamp hundreds of Edmontonians just days before Christmas in what is likely the city’s largest encampment sweep ever. Many of the people who live in those camps are constituents in the inner city riding she represents.
“The UCP government must be able to guarantee a safe place for every person impacted before police take action,” Irwin said. “We must stop criminalizing poverty as a province and a community. We can’t enforce our way out of the housing crisis.”
Best Alberta Cabinet Minister: Rajan Sawhney
For a second year in a row Rajan Sawhney has been voted Best Alberta Cabinet Minister.
Sawhney was new to politics when she was first elected in 2019 but quickly distinguished herself as a strong performer in a largely rookie cabinet and surprised many political watchers when she launched a campaign for the leadership of the United Conservative Party in 2022. She was eliminated after the second ballot but that didn’t end up hurting her political prospects.
After initially bowing out of the recent election after one term as MLA for Calgary-North East, she jumped back into the campaign when cabinet minister Sonya Savage announced she wouldn’t run again in Calgary-North West.
Sawhney’s decision to run again played a big role in helping the UCP hold on to the seat, and her cabinet experience ensured a significant role for her in the re-elected but reduced UCP government.
Now, as Minister of Advanced Education, she has proved herself to be competent and skilled at calming a ministry that caused considerable controversy during her UCP predecessor’s time in the role.
Sawhney also demonstrated independence from the UCP’s most radical wing by pushing back when delegates at the recent United Conservative Party annual general meeting voted in favour of government cutting financial support to post-secondary institutions that refuse to eliminate offices of diversity, equity, and inclusion (frequently referred to as DEI).
Best Opposition MLA: Rachel Notley
No one could have imagined what the future would hold for Rachel Notley when she was first elected to the Legislature on March 3, 2008.
The NDP had just lost half its seats, dropping from 4 to 2 MLAs, and the future looked bleak for the opposition parties that were pummelled by Ed Stelmach’s Progressive Conservatives in that year’s election. But despite the crushing loss almost everywhere else, NDP supporters cheered and celebrated Notley’s win that night in Edmonton-Strathcona. She was the future of the party and everyone knew it, but the possibility of occupying the Premier’s Office was far from anyone’s mind that night.
Fast forward 15 years and former premier Notley has transformed the Alberta NDP into a government-in-waiting and helped reshape Alberta politics into something unrecognizable to anyone from 2008. Despite an election loss last spring, Notley barely skipped a beat in organizing her new caucus by finding meaningful roles for the new class of Calgary NDP MLAs and taking aim at the UCP government.
The UCP’s unpopular campaign to leave the Canada Pension Plan and form a smaller Alberta Pension Plan was political gift that the NDP ran with, putting Notley centre stage at in-person town halls across the province.
Notley is widely expected to step down as NDP leader in the new year, but she remains a beloved figure in NDP circles and one of the party’s greatest assets.
Up and Coming MLA to Watch: Jodi Calahoo Stonehouse
Rookie MLA Jodi Calahoo Stonehouse was first elected last spring as the MLA for Edmonton-Rutherford, but she is no political rookie. Before jumping into provincial politics, Calahoo Stonehouse served a member of the Michel First Nation Council and campaigned to become National Chief of the Assembly of First Nations after the retirement of Perry Bellegarde in 2021.
Calahoo Stonehouse also served as Executive Director for the Yellowhead Indigenous Education Foundation and was a public member of the Edmonton Police Commission. She is a well-spoken member of the opposition and her advocacy in the Legislature led to the reading of a weekly treaty land acknowledgement in the Assembly.
Calahoo Stonehouse’s name also frequently comes up when discussing who might run for the NDP leadership when Notley decides to step aside. She is definitely someone to watch in Alberta politics.
Best candidate who didn’t win in the 2023 election: Karen Shaw
Cattle farmer and former three-term Sturgeon County Councillor Karen Shaw was a star candidate for the NDP in the last election and, as someone who can speak to lived-experiences in rural Alberta, would have been a valuable addition to the official opposition benches in the Legislature. But, alas, it was not to be.
Shaw helped the NDP increase their vote from the last election by 11-point in the Morinville-St. Albert riding, but that still left her a heartbreaking 6-points behind incumbent UCP MLA Dale Nally. The NDP did very well inside the slice of St. Albert included in the riding, but, like almost everywhere else in the province, the urban NDP wave crashed up against a big blue rural wall of UCP support as soon as it hit the city limits.
The NDP should try hard to figure out what it can do to ensure that candidates like Shaw consider running again in the next election.
Biggest Issue of 2023: Affordability and cost of living
Affordability and the cost of living was voted the biggest issue of 2023, and it’s right on the mark. It’s hard to go one day without noticing the increasing price of groceries, housing, insurance, and electricity, among almost every other daily cost.
The UCP government honed in on the importance of this issue by suspending the gas and diesel taxes (at least until January 1, 2024), and weaving affordability messages into most of its provincial autonomy initiatives, including its efforts to create an Alberta Pension Plan (claiming it will cost Albertans less) and opposing the federal government’s draft clean energy regulations (saying it will cost more).
The NDP have been slower and a little less focused on this file, but Janis Irwin, as noted above, has made the past year’s spike in rental costs a big issue for the NDP.
Best Political Play of 2023: The Strategists winning Best Political Play of 2023
The award for Best Political Play of 2023 goes to Zain Velji, Corey Hogan, Annalise Klingbeil and Stephen Carter.
Our friends at the excellent The Strategists Podcast directed their legions of loyal listeners to do what they came so close but failed to achieve in previous Best of Alberta Politics surveys. Voters in this category overwhelmingly chose The Strategists winning Best Political Play of 2023 as the best political play of 2023. It was a political play that redefined Alberta politics in 2023 and one that young Albertans will read about in the history books for decades to come. Congratulations.
I’m exercising my prerogative as publisher of Daveberta to insert what I believe many political watchers would agree was the best political play of 2023 (or, at least, the second best): the United Conservative Party’s win in 2023 election.
Acutely aware of Premier Danielle Smith’s long record of controversial and wacky political statements and far-from-mainstream views, the UCP re-election effort, led by campaign manager Steve Outhouse, launched a peek-a-boo campaign worthy of Joe Biden that sheltered Smith from media events on the campaign trail and sent her straight to UCP supporters.
Leveraging an NDP campaign that hammered Smith’s string of Trumpian political comments and failed to manage expectations, Smith performed well during the televised leaders’ debate because she is a media personality and is extremely comfortable speaking in front of a camera. To voters watching the debate, she didn't look or sound very scary, despite what they had seen in NDP attack ads.
The UCP were gifted a boost when the NDP fumbled a campaign announcement that included an unexpected corporate tax increase, which gave Smith’s party ammunition to claim the NDP would ruin Calgary’s economy. The NDP already had a narrow path to victory in 2023, but that misstep likely helped slam the door shut.
When the dust started to settle on election night, the UCP electoral strategy looked similar to what Smith had revealed to Postmedia columnist Rick Bell months earlier: the UCP could afford to lose a lot of seats to the NDP in Calgary and still win the election. As long as the UCP held on to voters in ridings like Calgary-Peigan, they would win. That was it. That was the play. It worked.
Thank you
Congratulations to all the winners and thank you to everyone who voted in this year’s survey. There is a lot of negativity in politics, so I started the annual Best of Alberta Politics survey back in 2017 as a way to recognize and reward some of the best people involved in Alberta politics.
With the end of the year fast approaching I’m going to try to publish one more column before New Year’s Eve, but in case I don’t get to it, I want to thank everyone who has read, subscribed and shared Daveberta over this past year.
I truly appreciate the support and feedback, and I’m looking forward to sharing new Alberta politics columns and episodes of the Daveberta Podcast starting again in January 2024.
Happy Holidays and Merry Christmas,
Dave