Band of outsiders
In a province that voted in Progressive Conservative majorities for 44 years, there's far more outsiders than insiders looking at the Alberta NDP.
“We don’t need to bring somebody in from outside to tell us who we are. We know who we are.” ~ Sarah Hoffman, Alberta NDP leadership candidate.
Ouch.
Leadership races used to take place behind closed doors and in private conversations with only the truly initiated. Most of the candidates, however, understand that even though they’re seeking support from the members, when they’re making public statements, those statements shouldn’t be especially exclusionary to people you will, presumably, be counting on for votes.
To be fair, I’ve only been around to watch the PC, Alberta Liberal, UCP, and CPC leaderships in 2017, the Alberta Party’s in 2018, the CPC’s in 2020, and the CPC and UCP leadership races in 2022, so my experience leans heavy on the conservative side, but it’s pretty rare to hear someone who is trying to sell memberships to win a leadership race talk about “outsiders”.
Unfortunately, the Alberta NDP is one of the oldest political parties in the province — second only to the Alberta Liberals — and aside from a small group of people who have been members since before the Alberta NDP was elected in 2015, most of the people in this province could relate far more to being an “outsider” than an “insider”.
On top of that, most people don’t buy memberships in political parties. Even the Progressive Conservatives, who were at the helm for 44 years, only had 200,000 memberships at its peak. The UCP’s most recent leadership race boasted 123,000. The Alberta NDP’s top number is somewhere around 30,000, despite receiving more than 500,000 votes in three elections.
Now, I understand that leadership candidates want to focus on the people who matter most: the members who will be voting. And it’s fairly safe to presume that if you’re a member of a party, you already feel like part of the club; it’s not a general election — you don’t have to appeal to everyone. Yet.
What has happened in every election since I’ve been paying attention, however, is things the successful candidate said during the leadership race has been dredged up for an attack ad in the following general election.
I understand some of the animosity from long-time members — this is their club and they don’t need “outsiders” — they formed government all on their own. That one time.
Who are you, really?
Some people woke up on May 6, 2015 to a real shock, and some of us watched the votes come in on Monday night, fielding calls from former Albertans who were settled in some eastern province who were also on the edge of their seats at the possibility the Progressive Conservative dynasty was going to be taken down — by the NDP.
Those next four years saw the new government battered by low oil prices, the official opposition, rural conservatives, and, surprisingly, a vocal group of their own supporters who accused them of not being progressive enough.
As a government who wasn’t expecting to form government, the Alberta NDP ended up with what was likely the most diverse and, ultimately, truly representative caucus the province had ever seen. There were far more women elected than in previous years, and caucus as a whole had people with incredibly diverse backgrounds. The conservative pundit class wasn’t impressed to see university students, but I certainly was — they were young adults whose perspective was legitimately what the future of this province looked like for them personally; their education, their future economic opportunity; housing.
From the PC’s caucus with an average age of 55, the NDP mirrored the average age of the population in Alberta: 38. It was fantastic to know that people who had clearer memories of the education system today were at the table; people who didn’t yet have children through university but who could be thinking of what the future held for them was cause for optimism.
On the whole, Albertans who had voted for the NDP (and some who hadn’t) were willing to give them a chance, but there was still a sense of trepidation, however small, about how much they would change the province. 60 years in opposition, and only getting seats in (cough) “Redmonton” meant that most people in Alberta had no idea who the Alberta NDP were.
They governed, as long-time conservative policy developer Ken Boessenkool put it, with a “conservative disposition”, with Premier Rachel Notley as “someone who, in her first shot, was surprisingly skeptical of radical change... who more regularly invoked the legacy of Peter Lougheed than folks in her own political lineage.”
There was a bit of a disconnect. Was the Alberta NDP an NDP who was simply more conservative than their namesakes in other provinces (as almost all political parties are, in Alberta), or were they just stifling the fact that they fell in line with their federal namesake, who demonized our oil and gas industry on the regular?
The premier and caucus would, when cornered, disavow statements made by the federal leader and caucus members, but also turn up to campaign with federal candidates because they, too, are NDP. The mixed messaging does not go unnoticed (and conservatives would ensure it didn’t, just in case people weren’t paying attention).
That’s the kicker: in a province that identifies strongly as “conservative” — where a party who at least had “conservative” in their name ruled for 44 years — the NDP “would never win again if some former Conservatives didn’t vote NDP.”
For 44 years, with exceptions in Edmonton, a majority of Albertans have reliably voted for one shade of blue or another at the provincial level. For longer than that, Albertans have reliably sent many more representatives of one shade of blue or another (even in Edmonton) to Ottawa each federal election.
A great number of Albertans, whether correctly (as Jared Wesley’s Common Ground Politics research demonstrates), or incorrectly (as is Ken Boessenkool’s argument, and Janet Brown Opinion Polling’s work for the CBC’s Road Ahead Series indicates), identify as conservative.
Electing an NDP government in 2015 wasn’t just a surprise to a lot of people, it caused an existential identity crisis.
So, who are we?
People grow and evolve. We have different life stages, and life events, and sometimes, we go from being politically ambivalent to change-my-entire-life borderline obsessive. Or, more charitably and less creepy, “passionate”.
Albertans, prior to getting a change in government in 2015, were clamouring for change. What they didn’t have, even during the election in 2015, was a shared sense of what, exactly, that change should be.
More people settled on NDP than Wildrose or PC in many ridings, but conservative support for one or the other option tended to remain strong. It really wasn’t a surprise, then, in 2019, that the penned in support for a single conservative party was so strong.
It was a missed opportunity, those four years in government, not to work harder to build the support the party had gained. While I always bristled at the term “accidental government”, the party did not see the highest support for a political party ever in the province — they had the highest support they’d ever received in the province.
The work Rakhi Pancholi began, and Naheed Nenshi is continuing, is offering an opportunity to see Alberta, and Albertans’ place within an Alberta NDP, differently.
Sarah Hoffman’s comment wasn’t wrong, exactly — she doesn’t need an outsider telling her who the NDP is; she already knows, even if others aren’t sure.
That’s why I think Nenshi is telling this story to Albertans about what he values within the party’s principles, and connecting those principles to what most Albertans already value. He’s working to reach Albertans who have voted conservative most of their lives and need to be welcomed into this new space they’ve never been part of.
Albertans just (relatively speaking) got rid of “an old boys club”, that had become “entitled” and was no longer listening to Albertans. In some ways, the NDP came across as just a different, yet still inaccessible club — not just outside, but inside, if some of the more public accounts of internal frictions are anything to go by.
Hoffman’s been NDP for a lot longer than the Albertans voting for them, just like Peter Lougheed was Progressive Conservative for longer than the Albertans he sought to vote for him.
He and his caucus of five spent their four years in opposition bringing their vision and story to Albertans and were rewarded with a majority government that lasted for decades. They turned a province of Social Credit lifers (30+ years) into a province of PC lifers. It’s the same tactic Jason Kenney used to bring in the UCP — though he did have an easier time of it, playing to the conservative identity and all.
Even if Nenshi doesn’t win this leadership contest — and that’s only the first stage — the NDP need to continue the work he’s started, if for no other reason than a documented history in Alberta of it actually working.
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I was a member of NDP before 2015 and I thought it was the end of oils strangle hold on our province and was angry the NDP didn't raise royalty rates, or business taxes more. Contrary to conservative opinion the NDP did not make massive raises to taxes but, no more than two percent if I remember correctly, and royalties options the oil industry could swallow.
Yes there are NDP has members long in the tough, stuck in their ways, and don't want their beliefs changed. The world has changed however and so to must the NDP. Communism although a great ideal has proven to be fallible to the manipulations of power seekers. Capitalism as Hayek saw it is also a great ideal but has always been a tool of the powerful. Somewhere in the middle imo is the sweet spot and people must be willing stop listening to the ideology and base their decision on the evidence, even if it means voting for another party.
Yes we may have got rid of the old boys network, but now it's been replaced the corporate network.
spot on!