A Wake-Up Call for Nenshi and the Alberta NDP

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 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 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,” Janet Brown told CBC when the broadcaster released her survey results 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, or UCP.

Arguably Brown’s characterization of this phenomenon as a “honeymoon” isn’t quite right. It sounds more like the premier is holding on to her base while Nenshi is failing to hold on to 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 CBC has asked 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 the disengagement of a good part of the NDP caucus with seats in the legislature too.

And once that grumbling begins, 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.

Last week 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.”

On the weekend, 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.”

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 notes the poll results and observes 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.”

Cournoyer’s column looks at the three Alberta byelections scheduled for June 23. He argues convincingly that while Nenshi is likely to capture Notley’s former Edmonton-Strathcona seat, and the NDP to hold on to Edmonton-Ellerslie, the UCP’s biggest problem is potentially not from the NDP at all, but from the 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.”

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.