It is to be hoped that Premier Danielle Smith’s continuing strong polling numbers will catch the attention of someone in Alberta’s New Democratic Party Opposition, preferably somebody to whom Leader Naheed Nenshi will pay attention.
The former Calgary mayor who cruised to victory as previous NDP leader Rachel Notley’s replacement a year ago this June – which in case you missed it starts tomorrow – is seriously underperforming and serious people are starting to notice.
If you doubt Nenshi is underperforming, consider the Janet Brown Opinion Research poll done for the CBC between May 7 and May 21 that shows more than half of Albertans still supporting the premier – dodgy contracts scandal, deconstruction of health care, footsie with separatists, and Alberta’s emergence as the Republic of Measles* notwithstanding!
“It’s really quite amazing that two years in, she continues to enjoy a honeymoon,” Brown told the CBC when the broadcaster released her survey results last week showing that if an election were held right now, 52 per cent of decided and leaning Alberta voters would vote for the United Conservative Party (UCP).
Arguably Brown’s characterization of this phenomenon as a “honeymoon” isn’t quite right – it sounds more like the premier is holding onto her base while Nenshi is failing to hold onto the NDP’s. But we need to take her conclusions seriously. There is no pollster with a better take on what Albertans are thinking, and how they’re likely to behave. I’m very glad the CBC has asked Ms. Brown to poll for the benefit of the public.
So it’s no longer just some blogger who admits he’s an NDP supporter grumbling about his frustration with Nenshi’s apparent disengagement, and that of a good part of the Opposition caucus with seats in the Legislature too, and when that happens a narrative will start being written.
And, inevitably, that narrative will eventually winkle its way down to even the most uninformed voters, and bad things happen to leaders who don’t listen to messages they need to attend to.
In Nenshi’s case, this is now starting to happen.
The CBC’s Jason Markusoff offered some commentary on why Smith seems to be doing well, and Nenshi not so well.
“It seems like the hero of 2013 Calgary isn’t stirring hearts in 2025 Alberta,” Markusoff concluded. “The massive enthusiasm that surrounded his big win last year as the Opposition party’s leader appears to have failed to resonate beyond his base.”
Brown’s poll shows “NDP fortunes have fallen sharply in Calgary under its first Calgarian leader,” Markusoff reported, with the party now trailing the UCP by 13 percentage points in Cowtown, “nearly as far back as they are provincewide.” (Thanks to Markusoff, by the way, for his shoutout to this blog for its early acknowledgement that Nenshi was not living up to the expectations of the NDP base who chose him as leader.)
Also yesterday, the profane but often prophetic Evan Scrimshaw drilled into Nenshi’s “Dangerously Nothing NDP Leadership” in his Scrimshaw Unscripted Substack column.
“Nenshi is a candidate with high name recognition and bad approvals,” Scrimshaw wrote. “He’s not a candidate you’d expect to poll badly but grow as the province gets to know him more. He is a known quantity and he’s 13 per cent underwater and at 40 per cent giving him low marks. This is a five alarm fire for the NDP and for believers in progressive values.” (Emphasis added by me.)
Or it should be, anyway.
“Nenshi is the available progressive option in Alberta, for good or for ill,” Scrimshaw noted, so we can’t just flounce off and forget about him. The problem is, according to Scrimshaw, “Nenshi has yet to give anybody a sense of what a Nenshi NDP looks like – either how it is different to the Notley party or how it is going to bring the province together.”
In his Daveberta Substack column Thursday, commentator Dave Cournoyer also observes with reference to the same poll that “despite implementing a political agenda much more radical than anything that was promised on May 29, 2023, and being dogged by controversial scandals and allegations of corruption, Smith’s UCP continues to hold its support in the province.”
The column looks at the three Alberta by-elections scheduled to take place on June 23. Cournoyer argues convincingly that while Nenshi is likely to capture Ms. Notley’s former Edmonton-Strathcona seat, and the NDP to hold onto Edmonton-Ellerslie, the UCP’s biggest problem is potentially not from the NDP at all, but from the openly separatist Republican Party of Alberta in the Olds-Didsbury-Three Hills riding north and east of Calgary.
“You wouldn’t know that it’s a safe UCP seat from the way Smith’s government is acting,” Cournoyer wrote. This explains Smith’s footsie with separatists and culture war about school libraries, he argues. “The UCP is spooked that influential separatists inside the party will leave to create their own party or join another one, making the United Conservative Party not a very united conservative party.”
Well, maybe it’s as simple as Brown’s suggestion that the collapse of the federal NDP has wounded the Alberta NDP as well. Personally, I think the opposite might result. But something is wrong, and it needs to be addressed.
We can’t expect Nenshi to ship out, but he does need to shape up. A good place to start might be by listening to some of the party veterans who kept the provincial NDP’s flame burning during the party’s long years in the wilderness.
Q: Mirror, Mirror on the wall: Who’s the fairest of us all?
A: Not the same guy we were swooning over last June.
Wait a minute, only the government is allowed to turn the courts into a political circus!
“Alberta accuses auditor general of turning court into a ‘political arena,’” says the headline over an Edmonton Journal story about the latest sparring between the legal teams representing the provincial government and former Alberta Health Services CEO Athana Mentzelopoulos, the plaintiff in a wrongful-dismissal lawsuit.
But wait! This is Alberta! Only the government is allowed to do that!
Journal reporter Matthew Black does a good job of explaining the government lawyers’ argument that the court should ignore AG Doug Wylie’s effort to keep them from upsetting his investigation of the dodgy contracts scandal by cross-examining Mentzelopoulos about documents she emailed to herself soon before she was fired, so I’ll leave it to readers to get the basic facts from him.
That headline, though, is steeped in unintended irony when nobody uses the courts to score political points like Danielle Smith’s UCP does.
Wylie is obviously not trying to play politics. He’s an independent officer of the Legislature, a serious guy charged with the serious responsibility of seriously auditing serious matters. He is trying to do is his job without political interference.
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Nick Seebruch, editor
