Say hello to the Calgary NDP

Alberta NDP membership sales surged in Calgary, leaving Edmonton in the dust

Alberta NDP leader Rachel Notley and former Calgary mayor Naheed Nenshi during the final week of the 2023 election (source: Rachel Notley / Twitter)

Back in September 2009, I wrote about the Alberta NDP annual convention for the now defunct SEE Magazine. The big topic of debate facing around 200 New Democrats who spent that weekend in the dreary halls of a downtown Edmonton hotel was whether their 2-MLA party should consider forming a coalition with the other opposition parties against the then-governing Progressive Conservative Party.

The debate was heated but, in the end, the motion was defeated in a decisive 120-40 vote by the delegates (and, as it turned out, six years later the NDP didn’t need a coalition with other parties to beat the PCs).

One topic not high on the list of priorities of NDP supporters in that Edmonton hotel was a by-election campaign happening at that moment 300 kilometres south in Calgary-Glenmore.

I remember asking a few NDP delegates if they were concerned that most of the party’s volunteers were in Edmonton that weekend and not helping their candidate in the Calgary by-election (it turned out to be a pretty important by-election). The most common reactions I got were shrugs. No one in that room 15 years ago believed any riding in Calgary was winnable for the NDP. At that point it had been two decades since Calgarians had elected any New Democrat to the Legislature, so why even bother trying?

How the times have changed.

The Alberta NDP announced last week that the party’s membership list has surged to 85,144 members in the race to replace party leader Rachel Notley. And the largest group of Alberta NDP members are now in Calgary.

Calgary-Mountain View MLA Kathleen Ganley launches her campaign for the Alberta NDP leadership (source: Kathleen Ganley / Facebook)

First mentioned by columnist Graham Thomson and later delved into by the CBC’s Jason Markusoff, the NDP membership is split with around 46 per cent living in Calgary, 25 per cent in Edmonton, and around 29 per cent outside the two largest cities.

According to a riding-level breakdown of the NDP membership list provided to the CBC by leadership candidate Kathleen Ganley’s campaign, eight of the ten ridings with the most NDP members are in Calgary, with Edmonton-Strathcona and Edmonton-Gold Bar as the only two capital city ridings to make the top 10.

A reliable source in the NDP who spoke to Daveberta disputed the accuracy of some of the riding-level numbers, saying that the regional membership tallies provided by Ganley’s campaign are close but the local numbers, especially in rural ridings, are not all accurate.

At 85,144 members province-wide, the NDP quite possibly now has the most members of any of non-conservative party in Alberta’s history.

The number of members in Calgary is a big deal and a reflection of how much time and resources the NDP poured into the province’s largest city in the four years ahead of the 2023 election.

This is a big shift, because Edmonton has been the party’s traditional base of support. With the exception of Grant Notley, who spent more than a decade as the NDP’s lone voice in the Legislature from his northwest rural riding of Spirit River-Fairview, all of the NDP’s leaders have been from Edmonton.

But, as many Edmonton NDP MLAs concluded after the 2019 election, their party wasn’t going to win in 2023 by racking up even bigger margins of victory in Edmonton. Calgary was their focus. The NDP moved their campaign headquarters to Calgary and Notley spent every spare moment in the city.