The Alberta NDP now has 85,144 members eligible to vote in the party’s leadership race, chief returning officer Amanda Freistadt said in a news release yesterday.
Meanwhile, this morning, candidate Gil McGowan announced in an email to supporters that he is dropping out of the race. “I’m writing today to let you know that I’ve made the hard decision to suspend my leadership campaign,” he said in the email. “Paying the final instalment of the $60,000 entry fee — which was due last night at midnight — has proven too much for me.”
The dramatic increase in membership from slightly more than 16,000 at the end of 2023 is, obviously, a direct result of the interest generated by the race to choose a new leader to replace Rachel Notley, who announced in January she intended to step down.
The Alberta commentariat gives the credit to former Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi’s campaign, and that is probably correct. Mr. Nenshi claimed in his summation at Saturday afternoon’s leadership debate in Calgary he has 10,000 volunteers working on his campaign, a formidable force capable of signing lots of additional members.
But candidate Kathleen Ganley, justice minister in Ms. Notley’s NDP cabinet from 2015 to 2019, published a statement Sunday evening taking some of the credit too.
Ms. Ganley said she was “thrilled to also announce that Calgary-Mountain View, my riding, now has more than 3,500 members and is the largest Alberta NDP membership in the province!”
Now, 85,144 is still a smaller number than the membership claimed by the United Conservative Party led nowadays by Premier Danielle Smith, which was reported in 2022 to have reached just under 124,000 members.
But we can also have more confidence in Ms. Freistadt’s numbers, it is said here, which are untainted by the kind of shenanigans reported to have gone on during the UCP leadership race won by Jason Kenney in 2017.
We’ll probably never know how many Albertans were members of the UCP but didn’t know about it, with their voting pins used by one of the leadership campaigns, but suspicion is bound to linger about the accuracy of the governing party’s membership claims.
There should be no question, though, about the ability of the UCP to run a strong and well-financed campaign and get Albertans to vote for their riding candidates – and the number who vote for each party in a general election is the number that really matters, obviously.
“This leadership race is an historic moment for the Alberta NDP,” Ms. Freistadt said in the Opposition party’s news release. “Voters from all walks of life and all regions of the province joined the Alberta NDP because they are excited to support our party in forming the next government.”
“The leadership race rules, set by provincial council, ensured a process with a high level of integrity and transparency,” she averred.
To be eligible under the rules set by the NDP’s provincial council soon after Ms. Notley’s announcement, voters had to have been members in good standing by April 22. Ballots will be mailed to members by Canada Post at the end of this month.
Voting will commence on June 3 and all of the ranked-choice ballots must be received by the party’s independent voting contractor by noon on June 22. The party will announce the new leader at the Hyatt Regency Suites in Calgary that afternoon.
Voting members will have the option to vote online, by telephone, or by returning their ballot through Canada Post to the voting company, the NDP release said.
With Mr. McGowan’s expected departure, the field of candidates has fallen to four – Mr. Nenshi, Ms. Ganley, Edmonton-Glenora MLA and former health minister Sarah Hoffman, and Edmonton-Rutherford MLA Jodi Calahoo Stonehouse.
During the closing summations of Saturday’s leadership forum, Mr. McGowan, who is president of the Alberta Federation of Labour, pleaded for donations, telling the approximately 1,000 people in the audience: “If I don’t raise another $50,000 soon, I’m toast.”
He had pitched a strategy of winning back the working class voters attracted to the UCP and other conservative parties in recent years and re-establishing the NDP as the party of workers. He was the only candidate who has raised that issue.
During the debate, he challenged Mr. Nenshi about the 2019 letter, written when he was mayor of Calgary, asking the newly elected UCP government led by Mr. Kenney to help out a scheme by the city to privatize public services by allowing the new owners to ignore the employees’ successor rights to their collective agreements.
There was a time such a revelation would have ended a NDP leadership candidate’s campaign on the spot, but not so much anymore.
At any rate, unlike last Wednesday when the story broke, Mr. Nenshi seemed to have his talking points in order and assured the Calgary audience that “I would never rip up a collective agreement; collective bargaining is sacrosanct.”
Old-timey New Democrats may wonder what it profits a party if it wins a majority but loses its soul, but apparently the urgency that many Albertans feel about the need to show Ms. Smith and the UCP the door almost certainly outweighs that sentiment.
Well this is a great pity. It means that any trace of a party concerned with working class Woodworth-Irvine Socialist Fellowship issues or old CCF truths have melted away, likely. Much the same has happened to the federal NDP. Time to rename ourselves the Canadian (blanche mange)Democratic Party with no irony intended.
The UCP have got to go. They are doing very pricey shenanigans, that cost us billions of dollars. Utility costs and insurance costs are skyrocketing. Poverty levels are swelling. There are problems with the public healthcare system and the public education system. Seniors are suffering. The environment is being degraded. Infrastructure is not being looked after. Pensions are being put at risk. Democracy is being stifled. Election promises are being broken. The UCP are quite a failure for a provincial government. I’ll stick with the NDP, because they are a much better choice for the well being of Alberta and Albertans.
I do feel it is very good to compare the current large numbers of NDP members to that of the UCP in their recent race, to put things in perspective lest the party become overly self congratulatory too soon. There is still a lot of work to be done to overtake the UCP and it will not be easy, regardless of who wins the leadership race.
However the UCP had the advantage of being in government when its leadership race was held and it had not just one, but two large membership drives – one for its drawn out leadership review and then another for the leadership race after that.
I suspect it is generally much harder for those who are not currently MLA’s, or those who are not a high profile former mayor, to successfully run. Thus, it is not a surprise to me that McGowan has now withdrawn and I don’t think it should reflect badly on his character or ideas, both of which I feel are good and solid. So this race will be distilled a bit more to the main candidates. The fee structure was in part designed not to keep people out initially, but to set an increasing hurdle for candidates, so perhaps it has worked as intended.
In the end, these days leadership races in major parties tend to won by those who can sell the most memberships. They are in effect an initial test of popularity and electability. However, having new people coming in can be unsettling, particularly to those who have been around for a long time and may be quite comfortable with how thing are, even if past electoral results were not always successful. So, for whoever wins, one major challenge will be integrating new and old members, keeping everyone motivated, relatively satisfied and focused over the next few years.
The problematic issue with the ABNDP’s leadership is they honestly believe they can’t lose because the UCP is such a train wreck, and an unrepentant one at that. The problem with this line of thinking is that it doesn’t work in a political ecosystem that gives high value to irrationality, and respect to the irrational. Remember when Hillary Clinton’s national campaign chair sent everyone on vacation prior to election day because, as he put it, the cake was baked? That was 2016 and there, according to George Clooney, would never be a President Trump. Rude awakenings still happen, and that result was the rudest of all.
So, the advice to the ABNDP is take nothing for granted, even a completely unhinged UCP, they let the stupidest people alive vote in Alberta.
Unfortunately, it’s always the battle between the ideal and the practical.
In this case, however, both crystallize in the necessity to remove that odious specimen, Smith and her UCP crew with whatever tools are available. Once that task has been achieved, further tuning can then be applied.
Regarding the number of UCP memberships: I read some time ago that this number included 14 yr olds and up. I was skeptical of that number, since they wouldn’t be eligible to vote anyway, but it was brought up on P&Politics, that this was an actual thing.
Is that why the Con-servatives are pushing for more babies— family votes??? I find this beyond disturbing!