It started as a race to replace Rachel Notley as the leader of the Alberta NDP. Now, with former Calgary mayor Naheed Nenshi’s official entry, it’s become an existential crisis for Alberta’s progressive politicians. Just how far are they willing to go to beat Danielle Smith and the UCP in the next election — and what will they look like if they do?

Nenshi made no secret of his desire to make the Alberta NDP’s proverbial tent as big and broad as possible. "I want folks to feel comfortable voting for the Alberta NDP regardless of how they vote federally,” he told the Western Wheel’s Amir Said in an interview. “I want federal NDP voters and Liberal voters and Green voters and PPC voters and Conservative voters to all feel like the Alberta NDP is still a home for them provincially, and one way of doing that might be to ensure in our party that we are truly independent."

That might mean severing ties with the federal party, a long-simmering internal conversation that Nenshi just put to a boil. “I think tying us to people whose values we might not entirely share, that we don't have control over, costs more than it benefits.” The other candidates in the race to replace Notley have mooted a more diplomatic version of this message, most notably Rakhi Pancholi and Kathleen Ganley, but none have taken it on as directly as Nenshi. Now, whether any of them like it or not, this will be the de-facto ballot question when members (old and new) cast their votes in June.

This wouldn’t be nearly as controversial in a Liberal or Conservative leadership contest, where new members are always the coin of the realm. But New Democrats are a different species of political animal, and they have always guarded their ideological borders more carefully. Hence, the eternal struggle for many New Democrats: Do they want to make the party as big and broad as possible or do they want to police and purity test new members in order to safeguard their core principles?

This played out most recently at the 2016 federal NDP convention in Edmonton, where Thomas Mulcair was tossed out as leader after one election and the “Leap Manifesto” took centre stage. It was impossible to miss the contrast (and conflict) between Mulcair’s pragmatism and the Leap Manifesto’s more radical calls to action, and it foreshadowed some of the internal divisions that defined the Notley government’s four years in power.

Formal federal NDP founder Tommy Douglas famously articulated his own position on the matter more than 40 years ago at an event celebrating the 50th anniversary of the 1933 Regina Manifesto. “If I could press a button tonight and bring a million people into this party, and knew that those people were coming in for some ulterior motive but they didn’t understand the kind of society we’re trying to build, I wouldn’t press the button because we don’t want those kinds of people.”

Nenshi’s button won’t bring a million new people into the Alberta NDP, but when he presses it — and he will — the party will see a surge of new members. Ironically, it might help other candidates attract a few new members of their own. “My membership sales go up every time he talks about entering the race,” Sarah Hoffman, the former deputy premier and candidate closest to Notley, told the Globe and Mail’s Carrie Tait. “They are worried about somebody from the outside who hasn’t ever really called himself a New Democrat being the leader of the party. They are motivated to be unapologetically New Democrat.” Julia Hayter, a Calgary MLA who is openly backing former justice minister Ganley, fired her own shots at the former mayor. “We have a guy stepping in to join our leadership race — someone who barely backed us when it mattered. Just like his endorsement, Naheed Nenshi is arriving at the last minute.”

In the end, though, these sorts of purity tests aren’t likely to matter to the people Nenshi is signing up. They don’t care that he hasn’t been a longtime NDP member. They don’t care that he hasn’t knocked on enough doors for them. And they don’t care that he hasn’t been suitably supportive of the party or its leader in past elections. All they care about is that they believe he represents the party’s best chance of defeating the UCP in 2027, and the province’s best chance of electing a government whose existence doesn’t revolve around fighting with Ottawa and rejecting the increasingly obvious realities of climate change.

If the other candidates in this race want to stop Nenshi, they’ll have to change that belief. They’ll have to prove to members that they can deliver the biggest win in 2027, not Nenshi, and that his political ceiling isn’t as high as his supporters might want to pretend — especially outside of Calgary. Most importantly, they’ll need to show their vision of both the party and the province’s future is more compelling than his.

That won’t be easy. It might not even be possible. But one thing is for sure: now that Nenshi is officially a member of the Alberta NDP, they’ll have to reckon with him one way or another.

The Liberals still don’t get it on housing

On Tuesday, Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland swung by a new apartment building in Victoria to tout her government’s role in helping with its construction. Hudson House, a 23-storey rental building that received $100 million from the federal government’s Apartment Construction Loan Program, bills itself as “a living space that’s far from ordinary.”

It’s also far from affordable. The rent on a 330-square-foot bachelor suite starts at $1,680 a month, with one bedrooms running at $2,410 a month and two-bedroom units checking in at nearly $3,300 a month. It’s hard to square those figures with the government’s press release, which suggest that 227 of the 245 units will be rented “at or below 30 per cent of the median local household income.”

As of the most recent census, the median household income in Victoria was $67,500. Thirty per cent of that spread out over 12 months is $1,687.50 — or just barely enough to afford the tiniest bachelor suite. Either the building is made up almost entirely of those (it isn’t) or the government’s math is off here.

It just so happens that the government sent me their math. They’re using median family income, which naturally isolates single people —– you know, the ones whothat tend to be renters. By that metric, the median income is $106,000, and the 30 per cent figure broken down monthly works out to $2,650 —– enough to cover a one-bedroom unit in the building, but not nearly enough to cover the two-bedroom units that a family would almost certainly need.
On social media, Freeland described these as “beautiful new apartments for low- and middle-income Canadians.” But if a family earning the median income in Victoria can barely cover the rent on a one-bedroom suite using the 30 per cent rule, how on Earth could someone below that threshold (which is, by definition, 50 per cent of the local population) make the numbers work – much less for a unit the size they’d need?

Look, I get it. They’re trying. They’re certainly trying harder on this front than they were even a year ago, much less before the pandemic. But Canadians want to see results, not effort, and I don’t blame them one bit. Until those results show, the Liberals are going to keep getting their rear ends handed to them by voters. And given how little they seemed to care about this issue before Pierre Poilievre took ownership of it, they probably deserve most of the political beatings they’re taking here.

Oh, but it gets worse

Housing isn’t the only file where they’re flailing, either. Last week, Liberal MP Ken Hardie tried to push back against Poilievre’s suggestion that Canada is “broken” by pointing out that we’re actually doing relatively well compared to other countries. “Take a look around the planet,” he said on social media. “Yes, things are tough for some in Canada, but most of the world would love to trade their troubles for ours.”

This went over about as well as you might expect, which is to say, “very poorly.” Canadians don’t want to hear that our struggles aren’t as bad as those of people in other countries, and I don’t entirely blame them. Yes, context is important — but so is empathy. And, as always, when you’re explaining in politics, you’re losing.

A better approach here would be to point out who, exactly, is breaking key aspects of our country. As I’ve written before, it’s the provinces that are sabotaging things like health care, education and the federal government’s $10-a-day childcare program. It’s the provinces — the ones with conservative governments, actually — that are actively filibustering any and all federal efforts to address climate change.

Rather than rejecting the premise of Poilievre’s attack, the Trudeau Liberals should channel the energy it’s creating and use it to their advantage. We know Poilievre won’t stand up to the provinces that are already trying to undermine federal programs and priorities. If anything, he might actively help them.

Who, then, is actually able and willing to fix the things that are breaking? That, it seems, is a far better rebuttal than trying to tell people that the things they already perceive as bad are worse somewhere else.

Quick Hits

With Joe Biden and Donald Trump officially confirmed as their party’s presidential nominees, we’re doomed to a rematch of the 2020 election. Its outcome will, of course, turn on issues like the future of democracy and the rule of law and Trump’s insatiable desire for retribution and revenge against those who keep defending both. But climate change could play a bigger role than some people might expect.

As Bloomberg’s Mark Gongloff noted in a piece back in January, this isn’t because it rates highly on people’s list of top concerns. Indeed, in a recent Gallup poll, only two per cent of Americans rated climate change as the biggest issue facing their country. But at the political margins, it could prove to be much more decisive than that. After all, according to new research out of the University of Colorado at Boulder’s Center for Social and Environmental Futures, it gave Biden a three per cent bump in support in 2020 — just enough to swing the election in his favour.

Those dynamics are very much still in play. Americans may not put climate at the top of their agenda, but polls show an abiding concern about the issue. In a recent ABC News/Ipsos poll, the Democrats had a 26-point advantage on that issue, one that was bigger than the Republican lead on things like immigration or crime. As Gongloff writes, “Denialist rhetoric may turn on hard-core Republican primary voters. But it risks turning off almost every other constituency in a general election, including younger Republicans who increasingly want their party to get serious about the climate. It’s not just good policy; it’s good politics to boot.”

Let’s hope.

Speaking of polls, I’m sure progressives in Canada are all tired by now of seeing reports showing Poilievre’s Conservatives with an increasingly massive lead. Those polls got me thinking the other day about Paul Wells’ famous “rules,” ones that have tended more often than not to bear out in the fullness of time.

1. For any given situation, Canadian politics will tend toward the least exciting possible outcome.
2. If everyone in Ottawa knows something, it’s not true.
3. The candidate in the best mood wins.
4. The guy who auditions for the role of Opposition leader will get the job.

With the possible exception of No. 2, the prospect of a crushing Poilievre majority in 2025 would seem to break all these rules. A landslide majority would be very exciting, after all. Nobody outside his political payroll would suggest he’s defined by his sunny ways, and he very clearly is still auditioning for the role of Opposition leader, as I wrote earlier this week.

Wells’ rules aren’t ironclad, of course, and they’ve been broken before (the 2015 election, for example, clearly upended the first one). But all of them, all at once, in the same election? We’ll see, I suppose, but it’s worth putting a marker down here all the same.

It’s also worth noting that Wells, who used to be a staple of Canada’s much-maligned mainstream media, is now publishing his work exclusively on his Substack. Meanwhile, the National Post, Wells’ former home in the early 2000s, decided to publish a bizarre op-ed on actress Sydney Sweeney that attracted international mockery. As The Beaverton noted on social media, “We're trying to come up with something stupider than this, but it isn't easy.”
Why is a Canadian newspaper publishing an op-ed about American actors and their breasts? Perhaps because it desperately, desperately needs readers. As former Calgary Herald business writer Mario Toneguzzi noted recently, the daily print circulation for his old paper has dropped from 121,800 in 2008 to 18,379. It’s even worse for the Calgary Sun, which has seen daily print readership drop from 49,633 to 9,908.

David Climenhaga, himself a former Herald employee who now writes a blog about Alberta politics, rightly suggests this decline is due to the growing absence of actual content about Calgary and Alberta. I suspect the figures for other Postmedia papers, including the National Post, aren’t much better — and while posting hot takes about hot actors might juice their pageview counts with schadenfreude-driven traffic, it’s not a sustainable business model.

What does a sustainable business model for a media company look like in 2024? As a piece in the New York Times suggested recently, something akin to what we’re doing at Canada’s National Observer: comparatively small, nimble, focused, and driven by reader support and engagement. We still have plenty of room to grow, and we need all the support and engagement we can get.
But I can promise you this: We won’t be writing any paeans to the supposedly woke-busting beauty of American actors any time soon. No amount of engagement is worth subjecting you, dear reader, to that.

Required Reading

In the New York Times, John Vaillant writes about the new kind of “fire weather” occurring in Texas and what it means for that state’s future. It’s just another data point in support of his recent book’s thesis, one that seems to get stronger with each passing day.

Over in Saskatchewan — which, believe it or not, might be on the verge of electing its own NDP provincial government — veteran columnist Murray Mandryk has some harsh words for Premier Scott Moe, who got booed at the Brier curling tournament of all places. “Why those in government may now be oblivious to what everyone else sees as obvious is, oxymoronically, complicatedly simple. Over time, a government tends to further insulate itself from the growing unwanted noise by instead listening to those whose livelihoods depend on doing whatever the powers that be tell them to do.”

In The Tyee, my friend David Moscrop takes a deep dive into the idea of “ordered liberty,” one that underwrites the Conservative Party of Canada’s consistent hypocrisy when it comes to freedom. “It’s a concept shared in Conservative circles as they try to explain why some days their leader declares himself an anti-government defender of personal freedoms, and on others, embraces government intrusion in citizens’ lives,” Moscrop writes.

And in our digital pages, Bruce Lourie — who sits on CNO’s board in addition to his role as president of the Ivey Foundation — makes the case for Canada reaching its climate goals without a carbon tax. I am obviously sympathetic to this case, since I’ve been mooting some version of it for a while now. But it’s one the Trudeau Liberals ought to be taking more seriously, I think. It’s the ends that matter on climate change, after all, not the means.

As always, your thoughts and feedback are welcome. So, too, are any endorsements and encouragement that get others to sign up for this newsletter.

Until next week, friends.