Has Naheed Nenshi just had his reverse chicken salad moment?
It was future U.S. president Lyndon B. Johnson, then the Senate Majority leader, who astutely observed of Richard Nixon in 1958 that “in politics you’ve got to learn that, overnight, chicken shit can turn to chicken salad!”
Of course, the transformation can occur in reverse as well, as Mr. Nenshi, who until yesterday at least was the clear frontrunner in the race to replace Rachel Notley as leader of the Alberta NDP, may have just discovered.
Or maybe not. But whatever the answer is, it will tell a lot about the kind of party the NDP has become during Ms. Notley’s decade at the party’s helm.
Yesterday, Mr. Nenshi had to contend with the leak to The Canadian Press of a letter he wrote as mayor of Calgary in 2019 asking the newly elected United Conservative Party government of then-premier Jason Kenney to help out a city scheme to privatize public services by allowing the new owners to ignore the employees’ successor rights to their collective agreements.
The revelation of the letter to Labour Minister Jason Copping, signed by Mr. Nenshi, immediately prompted a flurry of sharp attacks by the other candidates to lead the Opposition party.
Alberta Federation of Labour President Gil McGowan, who has been running an aggressive campaign but is not considered by most pundits to be a likely winner, was particularly pugnacious in his response.
“No New Democrat I know would have ever signed a letter like that,” Mr. McGowan tweeted yesterday afternoon. “This is serious.”
“I was hoping that Naheed would apologize and say it was a mistake,” he continued in another tweet. “But he hasn’t done that. As the elected leader of Alberta’s largest worker organization, I’m very disappointed. And very concerned.”
Speaking to CP reporter Lisa Johnson, Mr. McGowan called the revelation “a pretty serious concern to be raised about someone who is running to lead what is, or at least was, the workers’ party.” (Emphasis added.)
Kathleen Ganley, the former NDP Justice Minister seen as the frontrunner until Mr. Nenshi joined the race on March 11, said on social media “I am deeply disturbed by the letter from former Mayor Nenshi that attempts to squirm out of a deal that he made with city workers. It also tries to change the rules around when the city can privatize a service.”
“The next premier of this province will be responsible for bargaining with hundreds of thousands of workers, including nurses and teachers,” she continued. “These professionals deserve to feel like they are negotiating with someone who respects their rights and will keep their word.”
Candidates Sarah Hoffman and Jodi Calahoo Stonehouse made similar points. “To sign your name to a letter that says that you were asking the government to do something that is counter to your values isn’t leadership,” Ms. Hoffman said.
Instead of apologizing for what he might have dismissed as a mere mistake, Mr. Nenshi’s response seemed slippery. “I never believed in it, and I did it because council asked me to do it,” he told CP. “I believe that collective agreements and collective bargaining rights are incredibly important.”
This would be easy to slough off if Mr. Nenshi were a candidate vying to lead another progressive party, say, the Liberals. But for the NDP, founded as a party of labour, perhaps not so much.
But many Albertans who may not be traditional New Democrats have been attracted to the big tent erected by Ms. Notley and are desperate to see Premier Danielle Smith and the UCP gone for good in 2027 have chosen Mr. Nenshi as the candidate most likely to be able to win the next election.
To many of them, signed up by Mr. Nenshi himself and his supporters, this is not likely to be a ballot question, if they care at all.
For traditional New Democrats, steeped in the party’s labour tradition, it will be a harder pill to swallow. Nor is privatization considered a virtue in NDP circles.
Will that be enough to knock Mr. Nenshi out of the race? Probably not. Candidates with momentum tend to survive such flaps.
But it does mean he’ll have some fences to mend with the party’s labour traditionalists, and if the outcome turns out not to be the coronation that most observers have been expecting, it may limit his scope of action as NDP leader. Given the tendencies suggested by his 2019 letter, that might not be a bad thing.
He’ll also need to come up with a better explanation than city council made me do it!
Look for Mr. Nenshi to remind voters about the raise of 12.5-per-cent over four years Calgary civic workers negotiated when he was mayor in 2014, compared with what public sector workers like teachers and nurses got when Ms. Notley was premier in 2017 and 2018.
One interesting question remains: Who leaked the letter?
As Mr. McGowan observed when someone accused him of doing it, the most likely suspect is Ms. Smith’s UCP. “Who else,” he asked, “would have access to this private correspondence between a mayor and the UCP minister of labour?”
Yes, this may take some air out of the Nenshi coronation balloons. On the one hand this may not be a bad thing, a more competitive race would be a good thing in my opinion and several other good candidates have been overlooked. However, if Nenshi becomes leader anyways, this is the type of thing that could damage him. He has a number of strengths, but contrition is not one of them.
It may very well be true that council pressed him to write the letter and it does not reflect his beliefs, but some more contrition or expressed regret at this point would help a lot. I do also feel this is an example of UCP mischief here as they are likely the only ones who had access to the document. However, they did not force Nenshi to write it. I doubt neither the UCP or Nenshi anticipated the situation he is in now when the letter was written.
I am actually a bit surprised Nenshi wrote such a letter and feel it probably does not really reflect his beliefs. So a sincere apology and a promise not to do this again would probably help a lot. Fortunately, people can be both a bit skeptical yet willing to forgive.
The UCP most definitely anticipated the backlash! Otherwise why do it? They’re scared of him.
This is a glitch that has to be dealt with by Naheed Nenshi. However, Danielle Smith is going to be finished, either before the 2027 provincial election in Alberta, or at the provincial election debate, no matter who the new NDP leader is. Her lies are catching up to her.
Who leaked the letter? Hmmm…this could be the makings of yet another updated version of that whodunnit board game Clue. Miss Scarlet? Colonel Mustard? My money’s on Professor Plum. Get your friends together this weekend to find out who.
Hello DJC and fellow commenters,
This is a somewhat surprising turn of events. However, I tend to believe Mr. Nenshi’s explanation.
Calgary City Council does some vey peculiar things. Take, for instance, Council’s majority vote (11 including the mayor in favour, and 3 against) in September 2023 to have almost blanket land use zoning to R-CG, which allows 12 dwelling units on what is not zoned single family RC-1.
This idea is so “excellent” that some areas, including Upper Mount Royal which is full of expensive, mostly large, single family homes is totally exempt from this re-zoning. The lack of benefit of doing this re-zoning is glaringly obvious.
The city literature blared in page after page of its biased literature that this would increase “affordability” which was never defined. However, during the hearings, I heard Councillor Penner state categorically that the zoning change was not about “affordability” at all. Councillor Penner demanded that several presenters before City Council to speak to this issue show her where any City of Calgary literature says that the zoning change was about affordability. It seemed to ultimately be generally accepted part way through about 12 days of hearings that ended this week that neither the proposed zoning change nor the hearings were about “affordability at all. Apparently, the hearings became about enabling the building of more housing. This housing included lots with 12 housing units to be permitted on one lot. These units could include 4 basement suites which, if you look at current rental listings, are one-bedroom and one bath and will cost about $1500 to $1550 per month to rent. That is about twice the the amount of the CMHC guideline for housing costs for someone working full-time at minimum wage employment in Calgary. The City is allowing, nay encouraging, developers (who aim for at least 15% profit) to build for themselves or other investors 12 homes squished onto a single family lot with only a total of 2 on-site parking spaces required for the 12 living units, or doors as they seem to be called in real estate parlance.
From what the City Planning department told me when I phoned, these units probably cannot be divided up so individual owners can own any of these units. Thus, the entire parcel of land with the 12 units on it would be owned by one owner. Consequently, the only entities that likely to be able to afford to purchase these lots with the housing on them will be investors, probably large investors who will continue to concentrate land ownership in fewer and fewer hands, to the detriment to the population who live here.
I recommend that everyone watch the Canadian documentary Push, available on TV Ontario among other places, that shows how, worldwide, this style of investor ownership is a significant cause of the continuing increase in cost of all types of rental housing which is often owned by nameless, faceless absentee landlords. Also read anything you can find by or interviews of Professor Martine August of the University of Waterloo who studies and writes about the “finanicalization” of housing which is significant factor creating very high housing costs in Canada and worldwide. Professor August was, I think, the author of the report by Maire Josee Houle who is the Canadian federal housing advocate.
Calgary City Council will now debate a proposed Land Use bylaw to entrench further exactly this kind of housing lack of affordability and make almost certain the further concentration of land in fewer and fewer hands of entities which will do their utmost to increase the cost of housing and to ensure that more and more land with housing built on it will be owed by them and their ilk.
This is not a conspiracy theory, it is demonstrated by knowledgeable academics who study it and by others such as Leilani Farha, now a housing advocate and formerly the UN rapporteur on housing for Canada whose journey for understanding is followed in Push.
I would suggest that, in view of the destructive policy espoused by many Calgary City Councillors last September on housing, it is entirely believable that City Councillors sitting where Naheed Nenshi was mayor would want to privatize City services.
If you look at the policies of Mayor Sim of Vancouver and Council’s majority decision, strongly opposed by Christine Boyle, to further pauperize low wage City workers at the bottom of the pay structure by repealing the requirement the City of Vancouver pay workers at least a living wage, it is possible to see how uncaring a City Council can be about its most underprivileged and poverty-stricken worker, it is very plausible to believe that Calgary City Council took a similar stance. And it is disingenuous, to say the nicest possible thing, about the other NDP leadership candidates who wish to make hay of this particular letter. I would go so far as to suggest that other candidates using this letter without explaining the context in which it was written borders on the unethical. Failing to tell the truth by omission.
So, I would be very inclined to believe former Mayor Nenshi when he says that City Council wanted him to make this bizarre request to the UCP.
May be a moot point. Probably won’t be any unions to slay in three years time. The UCP is operating by the tapeworm theory after all. Where’s the Ivermectin when you really need it?
This “controversy” shows exactly why the UCP is scared of Nenshi. I have been keeping track of media coverage of the leadership race and Nenshi gets more media coverage locally and nationally. The media doesn’t find anything the present NDP opposition say sexy enough and Nenshi will get headline after headline against Smith. Also when Smith can pivot from all her “truths” from days or months ago and ignored for 95% of her lies I don’t see this being an issue for Nenshi. If I was a conspiracy theorist like Smith I would say this is definitely a UCP plant. Ironically it causes some of the other candidates look less appealing for how they respond and helps Nenshi.
“…the most likely suspect is Ms. Smith’s UCP. “Who else,” he asked, “would have access to this private correspondence between a mayor and the UCP minister of labour?”
Excellent point. If it was indeed the UCP who leaked the letter, I wonder if it is also a tacit admission that it is Naheed Nenshi as NDP leader that has the UCP most concerned.
The UCP really, really don’t want Nenshi to win the NDP leadership race. Why is it that the UCP are very, very afraid of Nenshi? Is it because they know he can win the next provincial election in 2027?
You have a big name candidate regardless of an indiscretion from the past. The Ontario NDP has not had a leader of his star quality since 1995, the long ago days of Bob Rae. Unlike you, no bright light in the sky for us.
I’m guessing this is the part where someone has said, “Oooops! A smoking gun.”
Irrelevant is the only response I can muster.
This kind of revelation doesn’t change the my opinion that Nenshi is the most likely NDP candidate who can defeat batshit Smith in the next election.
At this point it’s not even about who would be the best choice of NDP leader. The number one priority and concern everyone in Alberta should have right now, is who can defeat Smith’s UCP/TBA.
Irrelevant? We’re talking about a would be union buster who won’t own his own words. Just another of the Prentice and Kenney opportunist ilk. This one seems a little more unsavory as his history shows no commitment or loyalty to a party he seeks to lead Okay I get it. Those two formerly positive characteristics are increasingly perceived to be meaningless and old hat when the game is personal political enhancement.
Remember the old line about a wolf in sheep’s clothing. I wouldn’t bet against him gaining an opposition seat in the Legislature and keeping ready a pair of floor crossing shoes. A possible future UCP leadership candidate? Watch your back Dani.
The City golf courses in Calgary are staffed by CUPE 37 employees. Nenshi claims that he signed the letter knowing that the request to eliminate successor rights for those employees would be shot down. No City golf courses were privatized. One was closed. Jyoti Gondek replaced Nenshi in October, 2021. In April, 2022, the City handed over a quarter of the garbage collection to a private contractor in a seven-year “pilot project”. GFL are bona fide union busters. CUPE 37 workers with Waste and Recycling were replaced. Calgary has farmed out temporary traffic control to private contractors as of November, 2023. Once again, CUPE 37 workers.
Here’s a heart-warming story about the beneficiary of the morally correct re-alignment of cash flows enabled by the Wokest of Woke Gondek:
“The big boat, according to the website superyachtfan.com, belongs to Patrick Dovigi — the Toronto-based founder and CEO of GFL Environmental, one of two private companies currently contracted for residential garbage collection in Winnipeg.
The yacht, with space for up to 14 guests, has a crew of 26 and costs $30 million a year to operate.”
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/winnipeg-garbage-collection-contracts-private-public-analysis-1.7067256
The rezoning in Calgary is simply part of making sure that the landlord class has a guaranteed opportunities for income growth as rent-seeking supplants productive economic activity. Not too much talk about housing co-operatives in the Great Calgary Housing Crisis. Which is good, because better dead than red. Go Flames!
As distasteful as this is, I have to give the UCP their due in terms of oppo work…reminds me of when the CPC under Harper released a video of Thomas Mulcair when he was an MNA in Quebec, speaking in support of Margaret Thatcher’s brand of neo-liberalism…it certainly changed my opinion of Mulcair (for the worse).
If Mr. Nenshi was truly ambitious he’d be running in a Calgary riding for the Federal Liberals….he’d be at home there.
But in the party of Tommy Douglas, Stephen Lewis and Jack Layton, he seems an oddity. Sure, winning is important….but not if you can change your beliefs like you change your socks……….to suit the needs of the day.
I couldn’t agree more. Douglas, Lewis and Layton worked like anode rodes in a hot water tank to draw the working class away from actions that actually threaten the plutocracy, whereas the plutocrats hate Nenshi.
Yawn. I’m not surprised that the mayor of a council would have to sign a letter he doesn’t personally believe in because the council he represents has directed him to send it. The alternative would be for the mayor to refuse to follow the will of the body he was elected by the citizens to represent and step down, letting someone else take the job and sign the letter. Premiers should also have to set aside their personal positions from time to time and represent the will of the legislature and the province. That’s the job. I’m more disappointed (but not surprised) that Gil McGowan would conflate his political and professional personas in his response by speaking as both a political candidate and as the head of the union he leads.
McGowan is not a union leader. He can claim to be a labour leader, though. He is the president of a labour federation, a position of very little significance. He has never negotiated a collective agreement.
I like to remind people of the good work of the AFL in keeping down the Reds. They got in on the ground floor in France, along with the Corsican Mafia and the CIA, because freedom isn’t free!
“THE CIA’S FRENCH CONNECTION AND OTHER FOOTNOTES TO HISTORY
…The CIA’s chief labor assets were Jay Lovestone of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and his top lieutenant Irving Brown. Over the next decades, the two men would use their respective positions in the international labor movement to clandestinely manipulate trade unions throughout the world.
…More importantly, the CIA helped forge a lasting alliance between the Marseilles Socialist Party and the city’s Corsican gangsters.”
https://stlreporter.com/2017/05/13/the-cias-french-connection-and-other-other-footnotes-to-history/
“To many of them, signed up by Mr Nenshi himself and his supporters, this is not likely to be a ballot question, if they care at all.”
I was going too ask if this was a typo—or too remark that I see what you did there.
Not being a professional in the field of labour relations, and knowing the depth of knowledge that our host and many of the posters here have, I’d like to ask some questions:
1. Are successor rights basic labour law?
2. Is voluntary recognition a valid tactic for incoming contractors?
3. Can a strike be automatic when successor rights are abrogated?
4. Is CLAC actually a union?
POGO:
1. Yes. http://www.alrb.gov.ab.ca/bulletins/PDFs%20of%20Bulletins%20as%20at%20Oct%202023/21bulletin.pdf
2. Yes. Voluntary recognition is always a valid tactic. Many employers, however, would be unwilling to do this for reasons legitimate and illegitimate.
3. No. A strike is never automatic, there is a process which must be followed before a legal strike can take place. This would be made legally impossible if a bargaining unit had been deprived of its union.
4. Yes. Legally, in Alberta, anyway. Whether CLAC is a “real” union in the normal sense of the word remains controversial.
DJC
I was a clac member and can fully say as such, they are not a real union, starting with their lack of a coherent grievance policy…..
“Christian” labour ; I’m not sure and would have to check by that smacks of the “free” trade unions Philip Agee nodded to in his whistleblowing comments, “company” unions.
(The company in this case being the Central Intelligence Agency)
Bird: I agree. My point is that, in Alberta law, CLAC is a real union, that is to say, a legl union, able to bargain collectively (if not well) on behalf of its members. DJC
It would be easier to accept Nenshi’s denial if he hadn’t voted for the motion in question. But he did. It’s in the council minutes from their Nov 16? 2019 meeting. Only Carra, Farrell, and Woolley voted against it.
He’d have a somewhat stronger defense if he owned up to it, addressed the budget crisis the City found itself, it, and framed it as an overall measure being considered to minimize job losses in that context. That it was one element of a multi-part motion.
I’d also suggest the other candidates ask themselves if they really want to be doing the UCP’s bidding right now.
I suspect this won’t be much of a splash. Ujal Dosanj and Bob Rae prominent New Democrats became federal Liberals and equally prominent. Sadly it just reflects, perhaps since the founding of the New Party, how fuzzy the boundaries are between a right centre and left centre party, and our lack of class based politics. Canada has regional politics.
In any event, should Naheed Nenshi win the leadership perhaps that would be the basis of a whispering campaign to the effect, what a “responsible, business like leader he is, in the style of Premier Blakney. I don’t like this leak, but the UCP may live to regret this, if this is their handiwork. The leak may lead to unintended results.
Feel like people raised these sort of concerns when he announced his purple candidacy…
This just illustrates one of the downsides of the modern party leadership election process — which all major parties, both provincial and federal, have now bought into, on the flawed premise that it is more “democratic” than the old, delegated convention system.
One-member, one-vote, and allowing membership “sales” during the campaign, allows people who have never been involved in a political party, and have no commitment to its long-held values, to become instant members and vote on the party leadership. The party leadership becomes a popularity contest, when it should be about what party members want to see happen at the next election.
The delegated convention system had its flaws too, of course, most prominently among them the outsized influence of ex-officio delegates — sitting MLAs, party board members, and others not elected by a constituency association. And the phenomenon of “instant members” was not unknown under that system — witness Brian Mulroney’s two federal PC leadership campaigns in the late 1970s and early 1989s. But that system tended more to give greater weight to established party members with a commitment to party values than the current system.
I think the delegated convention system should have been tweaked to reduce the influence of special status delegates, and membership lists frozen as of the date the leadership campaign formally began, rather than go down this road of one-member, one-vote.
It’s a bit like the difference between representative democracy and direct democracy — i.e. government by referendum. Direct democracy actually yields undemocratic results, as we have seen in the Benighted States.
“No New Democrat I know would have ever signed a letter like that!” posts Gil, who carried water for the Notley NDP while they stuck public sector workers with wage freezes throughout their entire term. Ganley and Hoffman, taking shots at Naheed too, were in the very cabinet that did it!