Bored reporters were trying to gin up a little post-election excitement yesterday speculating about whether Rachel Notley will stay or go now that her New Democrats are back in Opposition, albeit with a significantly larger caucus than before May 29.
“Rachel Notley ‘considering’ her role as Alberta NDP leader following 2nd-straight election loss,” CTV intoned portentously, implying that the Opposition Leader is pondering a quick exit.
“New Democrats in Alberta may have a new leader heading into the next election, after all,” CTV’s reporter hyperventilated, no doubt dreaming of an entertaining leadership race.
He quoted Ms. Notley, 59, telling a group of reporters that “what I can promise you is that when I’ve engaged in what I think is a responsible level of consideration, I’ll be sure to let you know.”
This may sound like a story to some reporters, but to me it smacks of dry Notleyan sarcasm that any of her friends would recognize.
Other media listened to the same words and took a slightly different tack. “Rachel Notley will remain as Alberta NDP leader — for now,” said the CBC. “Notley staying on as NDP leader, but will take time to consider future role,” Postmedia said.
Still, their hope for a leadership race was pretty clear.
Well, don’t hold your breath.
“It’s good leadership to consider your role leading up to an election and to consider your role after an election,” Ms. Notley told the reporters, sensibly enough. “I did that in 2015, did it in 2019, did it leading into 2023, and of course I’m doing it now.”
I can tell you that when Ms. Notley says something like this, she’s thought about it carefully and she means what she says. She’ll consider her options, what’s good for the party, and what’s good for her family and for her.
Maybe she’ll move on, maybe she won’t. But it won’t be soon enough to create a good story for the summer of 2023.
My money’s on her sticking around, at least for the time being, no matter how much a few reporters wish she’d quit so they could have a leadership race to cover.
Ms. Notley, you see, isn’t a big baby like Jim Prentice, Alberta’s last Progressive Conservative premier, who threw a tantrum and quit on election night 2015 when the NDP unexpectedly won a majority, leaving the PCs in a state that ultimately led to the party’s collapse and subsummation into a Wildrose Party rebranded United Conservative.
“My contribution to public life is now at an end,” Mr. Prentice huffed moments after the results were announced, swiftly exiting stage right. He would have done better for himself and his party to stick around for a while.
Nor is Ms. Notley a Danielle Smith, who texted a reporter after her loss on election night 2012 that “I am leaving public life.” When more questions were forthcoming, she added, childishly, “piss off … leave me alone.”
If the election had gone the other way on May 29, I imagine we would have seen a similar scene unfold.
Be that as it may, that’s not Rachel Notley.
If Ms. Notley decides to go, she’ll stay long enough to ensure an orderly succession that leaves a party that won’t fall apart like the PCs did, to the great detriment of Alberta, after 2015.
If she decides to stay, it will be because she has a plan that she thinks can bring the party the necessary step closer to victory when the UCP fractures along ideological lines or does something to create a political or constitutional crisis.
Such developments are not impossible and may not be unlikely.
I am not, of course, predicting such a thing, but readers with long memories will recall that Pierre Trudeau was yesterday’s man after the 1979 federal election, and he was welcoming us all to the 1980s with a majority government nine months after that.
So stranger things than a bad relationship like the one called the United Conservative Party suddenly flying apart have happened before and will happen again.
But let me close with some speculation as idle as CTV’s: Have you ever wondered what would have happened if the PCs had lined up behind Alison Redford in 2014 instead of sending her to Coventry? What do you want to bet she would have beaten Ms. Smith a second time in 2015 and the PCs would still be the government today?
In the late Premier Prentice’s defense, he led party not used to losing, to a resounding third place defeat. He unnecessarily called an early election to do so. So, I don’t think his party really wanted him to stick around too long. Of course, his election night resignation only made the loss worse, leaving the party also unnecessarily and abruptly leaderless. He won his own seat and so could have stuck around for a much more orderly transition even if he decided to go then.
Notley is being smart and practical here. Everyone is trying to read the political tea leaves of what she said, but I think we should take it mostly at face value. She will stay for a while, see how it goes and make a decision later accordingly. Seems like a very sensible response in the situation.
I think in part that decision will depend on how Albertans feel in a couple of years. For instance, if in a couple of years the UCP and Smith are quite unpopular that might lead to a different decision than if they manage to maintain their current level of support. Of course as the old saying goes, the only thing more difficult than making predictions is making predictions about the future.
Latly, I do think we should also not forget how narrow that UCP victory was. They can not afford to lose more than four MLAs. That happened to Premier Stelmach a bit over a decade ago and more recently Kenney came dangerously close.
All kinds of things can happen in a few years. For instance, its not hard to imagine say some Calgary UCP MLAs who won very narrowly deciding to run Federally in the next election as a much safer bet. So it is probably too soon to come to conclusions about leadership.
Alison Redford, had she continued to be Premier and leader of the P.C.s they’d still have a P.C. party in Alberta and not the gang they have now. Of course Notley wouldn’t have been Premier, but still, Alison Redford was way ahead of those who came after her in the P.C. party and its various entities.
I do hope Notley stays as Party leader. She’s good at the job. Having a leadership convention at this time may not be the best plan. Given how frequently parties change leaders these days, i.e. don’t wind an election, off they go to something else. Not a smart move. As an ex used to say, success is 5 percent talent and 95% persistence.
This has long been the problem of political leadership in North America, where there appears to be a concerned effort by the leadership to prevent the advance of successors. In the US, we are witnessing the Democratic Party of the edge of self-destruction because they refuse to push their geriatric/senile leadership from office. Where is the young talent going to come from, unless they are allowed to advance?
In Notley’s case, if she doesn’t decide to step aside, she needs to think about moving on very soon. David Shepard is an encouraging sign that the NDP offers very fertile ground for youthful leadership. And now with the hopeful sign that there are strong MLAs coming out of Calgary, the ABNDP has a strong foundation to build on.
At some point, the UCP/TBA will, either, become hated by the Alberta voters for their lies and abuse. Or, the whole party will turn and disembowel itself. Either way, it’s not unreasonable for Notley to consider that her time is coming to an end.
Notley’s time is coming to an end you say? Perhaps, but only if we assume democracy has been hijacked by the irrational UCP. Confronting the profound changes coming to Alberta from human caused climate change and automation is a job for a reality-based leader like Notley.
However, the Ab NDP’s brain trust failed to assure Albertans they would address those profound changes which most rational people know are coming. That left the field open for Dani and Co. to lie about creating another oil boom while hunting for phantom environmentalists and arsonists to blame for the job losses in the oil service sector.
If the UCP continue in power I predict they will follow the old Social Credit model and continue looking for scapegoats rather than address real world problems.
Why do you insist that Alberta vote in a useless government like the NDP. I remember how much money they wasted while they formed the government of Alberta. Once they were voted out I had the pleasure of demolishing the offices of so many of the “govt funded businesses” that were collecting cheques and giving back nothing of value. Many of them were failed “green energy companies” that had prime real estate
locations in the downtown area. Talk about wasted money
Jason Voorhees: You are way off the mark, as one could possibly be. If you want to mention wasted money, you should be looking at what these phony conservatives and Reformers in Alberta were wasting money on, and the money they managed to lose in other ways. The obliteration of Peter Lougheed’s oil royalty rates has lost a whopping $575 billion. The worst corporate tax rates lost billions of dollars more. One very pricy shenanigan after another, with disastrous corporate welfare gimmicks with everything from metal smelting facilities, a telecommunications project, a waste treatment plant, pulp mills, the deregulation of our power, a bitumen processing facility, and a whole bunch more. We also have to cough up at least $260 million to address the orphan well issue, that began around 30 years ago by the Liberal turned Reformer, Ralph Klein. Are the UCP any better? They are not. $7.5 billion, or more, has been squandered on a pipeline, which was based on an assumption that The Donald, would get another mandate in America. There’s the loan guarantees that are also unaccounted for. $10 billion is gone from corporate tax cuts that have never even given any jobs. Billions of dollars were squandered on other very pricey shenanigans. $20 billion dollars is being given for orphan well reclamation, which the oil companies should have been paying for themselves. As for the size of government, the UCP’s government is unlike any other for size. More panels than a hardware store, just for the chums of the UCP. Postings that accomplish nothing of actual substance also go to chums of the UCP. The UCP has a cabinet that is very large, and is the biggest one Alberta ever had. Much larger than any other provincial government in this province. It used to sit at 27, but now the UCP has a cabinet of 24. Rachel Notley and the NDP had only a cabinet of 12. The wasted money and useless government happens to be coming from the UCP. Peter Lougheed was correct that you can’t trust Reformers. These phony conservatives and Reformers are taking Alberta to the poor house. It isn’t the smartest thing to be supporting them.
Buy a membership and vote at the AGM, I believe her constituents are very happy with her. I literally cannot imagine another leader doing a more capable job. It’s her machine she built it, she can drive it for as long as she wants. *shrug*
I guess those reporters will have to find another way to pass the time during the dog days of summer. I look forward to uplifting images of children at splash parks and dogs with bandanas eating ice cream. They greatly underestimate the solid political background of Rachel Notley. She is canny. Maybe they wanted Tyler tears?
Stop it. A practical Notley wouldn’t have announced a tax increase during an election campaign. And now, with batshit lady in charge, how do you know thee will even be splash parks, or any taxpayer funded parks at all? I bet batshit is busy figuring out how to sell Kananaskis to some other billionaire friends.
Why not just blame the NDP candidates that didn’t win ? Because it’s childish, and crying over spilt milk gets us nowhere. The idea that resistance to the creeping rise of fascism is going to come from the ballot box, especially in Canada, ESPECIALLY in ALBERTA is a complete fantasy. If you want to do something positive stop whining about Rachel Notley, who continues to crush elections in her constituency, and find some actual radicals to give your money to.
The thing about summer is, there is no snow for her to go for a walk in. My prediction? She will lead the Official Opposition caucus through the fall sitting, and use the winter break to reflect on whether to step aside and orchestrate an orderly leadership selection process, or stick it out for a few more years to see if she can get the NDP back into government. I think if she doesn’t go in December or January, she’s likely sticking it out until the next election or as long as her party will have her, whichever comes first.
Albertans are generally not Liberals: they want a communitarian party to lead government and that leaves the NDP and big questions about the UCP which has quite apparently been commandeered by the globalizing neoliberal model and its typical, far-right, televangelical minions on the ground. Red Toryism isn’t that far removed from what might be called “business democratic socialism” (we might even include anarchistic syndicalism—but I’ll leave Noam Chomsky to define what that is), and Rachel Notley’s NDP government proved it as of 2015.
That’s why her party won even more seats in 2023 than it did in 2019 when it’s first incumbency bid failed but the party retained a Loyal Opposition several times larger than it pre-2015 win: Albertans continued to look askance at the far-right plunge the UCP is taking. Many voters had hoped the ProgCon faction of the party Jason Kenney created by joining it with the farther-right Wildrose Party (once led by Danielle Smith before she blew her 2012 bid for power and crossed the floor to the Jim Prentice-led PCs) would temper the notoriously intemperate WR. Their disappointment registered in a pared-down UCP caucus which came very close to losing to the NDP in 2023.
If that analysis is correct, the UCP—now led by guess-who-Danielle Smith beholden by the Take-Back-Alberta faction, a far-right radicalized faction with overt secessionist ethos—will lose in 2027 (if it doesn’t implode before then). And that’s why Rachel Notley should stay on as NDP leader: she’ll have an even better shot at becoming premier in the next contest, whenever it happens.
And that’s because erstwhile ProgCons voted UCP on a hope and a prayer that their moderate faction will moderate the TBA faction. Or maybe the rule of law will do it—federal law, that is. But I’m going on record in predicting it more likely the small group of remaining optimistic moderates, the fulcrum of 2023, will be disappointed enough with this new UCP mandate— only its second and with a much reduced number of seats— to join many others who have abandoned the party. They’ll probably even up the number of mandates by electing the NDP to its own second one. To keep this trend as steadily seamless and deliberately relentless as it needs to be requires Notley staying on.
Looking at the bigger picture, it’s working, not just in Alberta but everywhere in the Western World where globalizing neoliberalism has usurped nominal conservative parties: the neo-right is in decline and only hanging on by doubling-down on demagogic and unethical tactics to the point of undermining the most sacrosanct fundament of democracy, fair and honest elections (this dangerous devolution is more blatant at the federal level in Canada and the USA, but we remember that K-Boy’s UCP leadership win came under RCMP investigation for electoral cheating—the case has not been resolved. There is no complaint about Alberta’s most recent election.)
Notley is doing just fine with respect this trend, and her steady hand on the tiller is exactly what her party needs to hold the UCP government to account and prepare for the next election. The big “but” has been well articulated: unlike the inter-election part of partisan politics, the election-campaign part needed a more aggressive and clever approach from the NDP: the tax-the-richest sop to party idealists wasn’t quite that—indeed, it probably frightened off or at least allowed those ProgCon hopefuls to rationalize sticking with a party they find increasingly repugnant. But the timing was perfect in the sense that Notley, if she decides to stay on and keep the ball rolling, has this relatively quiet inter-election time to address the NDP’s perennial problem of daring party stalwarts and ideologues to think more pragmatically during the punctuation of election campaigns.
Yes, it’s unfair that a newly-elected NDP is often left to clean up the mess left by right-wing predecessors (those messes are increasingly the result of trying to hang on to power for its own sake rather than to provide relevant policy) and hasn’t the time or, in Notley’s case, the revenues (from bitumen mining) to both appease the left-wing of its own party and the electorate’s concern for fiscally prudent government. It needs at least two back-to-back terms for voters to be convinced that, on average, the NDP can be as prudent as their fellow communitarian Tories—or even more so; definitely in comparison to Conservative governments which spend good public money on sorry-ass-protection.
To stay on-track the Alberta NDP needs Notley to stay calm and learn its lessons. 2023 provides the subject matter and, putting the fixation on elections and winning aside for the time being, the NDP has gotten passing grades, even without winning power. But of course winning government must be its ultimate objective. By the time Albertans have weathered and withered under Danielle Smith (which probably won’t even need a crash in bitumen prices), many more voters will embrace the NDP (especially when bitumen boom turns into petro-doom).
I said that it wasn’t enough to simply contrast Notley and Smith, and it won’t be enough to let the UCP develop evermore the contrast between steady certainty and erratic uncertainty. But, that being almost certainly a given, I hope Rachel Notley makes use of it while improving Dipper campaign strategy. Only she can keep the contrast clear, only she can convince the two types of communitarians critical to advancement: Dipper idealists and hopeful ProgCons.
Full disclosure – I live in Ms. Notley’s riding and duly voted for her again this election cycle. But after this loss I’m slowly joining the camp that thinks it’s time for new blood and new leadership. The issue is that she’s basically the face of the ANDP and after 2 straight losses it’s clear she’s considered toxic in some corners of this province. The NDP needs a new leader that can come across as compassionate and be a pitbull when required (as in dealing with the UCP and their BS); Notley has one of those qualities but is almost completely deficient of the other. The problem is the party just doesn’t seem to have an heir apparent, especially one possessing those traits. Dave Sheppard perhaps comes to mind but I don’t know if he has leadership ambitions or the fortitude to do what it takes to crush the UCP.
You really think a change in leadership is going to make the NDP less toxic in those corners of the province you prolly should think about it for a bit longer.
I will only say little bit about Rachel Notley. We needed her, and she delivered. We still need her and I guarantee, she’ll deliver! I have believed in her ability before Brian Mason. She is a real leader!
I believe Rachel Notley should stay on as NDP leader. The UCP still have fractures, and may splinter, sooner than we realize. It’s going to get worse, with the UCP in power, regardless. They will still inflict as much damage as possible, before they fall apart.
Alright, I’ll make my own prediction. Due to foreseen implosive and repulsive forces the abndp will be in charge by Christmas.
Interesting, JS bow valley. I’d like to know what scenario would allow for ANDP to take over by Christmas. I don’t foresee another general election in 6-8 months and I’m unclear on what other recourse there might be if, Gawd willing, the UCP really poop the bed soon. Mobs at the Leg demanding a change in Govt? Didn’t go so well for that ridiculous convoy.
I remain convinced that many folks commenting on this blog about the nature of rural voters have no idea what they’re talking about.
She did such a great job, she should stay forever.
Welcome back, Bret. I was worried about you. I was thinking about sending out a search party! DJC