Rachel Notley, Alberta’s first NDP premier and the woman who in 2015 broke the Progressive Conservative party’s seemingly unshakable grip on power in this province, has announced her full departure from politics.
In a social media post this morning, Ms. Notley stated her intention to write the Speaker of the Alberta Legislature and resign her position as MLA for Edmonton-Strathcona effective Dec. 30.
Beyond that, the statement – which you can read for yourself here – was mostly political boilerplate typical of retirement commentaries published by politicians leaving the field honourably after a long period of service, nearly 17 years as an MLA and a decade as party leader in Ms. Notley’s case.
The announcement didn’t come as a surprise. Ms. Notley made history by leading the NDP to an unexpected majority government on May 5, 2015, but saw her party go down to defeat at the hands of the United Conservative Party in the next two general elections in 2019 and 2023.
On Jan. 16 this year, after a disappointing loss in the May 2023 election, she announced her intention to quit as leader as soon as a new one was chosen. On June 22, former Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi was named as her replacement after a crushing 86-per-cent victory in the party’s leadership race.
Ms. Notley immediately retreated to the party’s back benches, but everyone in political Alberta understood that change was only temporary. She was replaced as Opposition leader in the Legislature by MLA Christina Gray until Mr. Nenshi could take up a seat in the House, which up to now he has appeared to be in no hurry to do.
So yesterday’s statement came as an expected coda, not terribly dramatic, immediately replaced by media speculation about whether Mr. Nenshi would run in her soon-to-be-vacant central Edmonton riding – which is pretty much the safest electoral district for the NDP in Alberta.
Ms. Notley included in her announcement a statement that “Naheed Nenshi’s selection represents a tremendous opportunity for all Albertans seeking practical solutions to the affordability crisis, along with a genuine commitment to fixing our health care so that all Albertans can get the support they need no matter where they live or how much they earn.”
Was this a hint that she thinks Mr. Nenshi should run in Edmonton-Strathcona, or merely a gracious wave of farewell to the new leader? It’s not entirely clear.
If Mr. Nenshi does run in Edmonton-Strathcona, he might be expected to be challenged by other prominent Alberta NDPers who have had their eyes on the riding since it became obvious it would be looking for a new MLA soon.
But if the party declares that he will be the candidate and there will be no nomination contest, as has been rumoured in the past few days, the new leader may need to pour oil on what could turn out to be troubled waters.
Perhaps a pledge to run in Calgary in the next election would be enough. Regardless, if Mr. Nenshi becomes the NDP’s candidate in Edmonton-Strathcona, he will need one of his characteristically disarming remarks to respond to the obvious irony of a former mayor of Calgary running to represent a central Edmonton riding.
Whoever runs to replace Ms. Notley as Edmonton-Strathcona MLA could have some organizational work to do as well. Ms. Notley was so popular within the riding that the party didn’t have to organize within its boundaries. That might still be so, or it might not. It would probably be best to assume nothing and not take that chance.
Premier Danielle Smith is required to call a by-election within six months of Ms. Notley’s resignation.
There’s not much she could do within that time frame to be a bad sport. Still, the UCP has shown a willingness to play games with the timing of by by-elections before – refusing to call one in Calgary-Elbow in 2022 at the same time Ms. Smith was seeking a safe rural seat, and timing next Wednesday’s Lethbridge-West by-election to take place when University of Lethbridge students are expected to be out of town.
I suppose all of the nice things that should be said, deservedly so, about Notley have already been particularly when she stepped down as leader. So this is more a formality, a final step. We now quickly look towards the future, which always seems less certain when someone who has been around so long, leaves.
I suppose Nenshi running in Notley’s seat could be an easy solution for the leader without a seat sort of problem that should now be resolved soon. It is an urban big city seat, the type Nenshi could be quite comfortable in if he wants to try expand his appeal beyond his home city. And there is a long tradition of Canadian leaders running in places, sometimes far from home, often with success. It also could solve the problem of getting another MLA, likely a newer one in his home city, to resign. Either Nenshi has been reluctant to ask any, they have been reluctant to offer, or maybe both.
The timing is also fairly good, Smith can’t call an almost Christmas election here and if elected Nenshi could go to the Stampede as an Edmonton MLA, just as Notley did.
Maybe Nenshi is saving his big debut for some not yet known future opportunity in his home city, but if not this would be as good a choice as any.
Given the recent events over the last two months, I am reminded of a comment someone made concerning the not-normal times we are living in. The commentator asked an obvious Trump voter about the current state of the new administration coming in. The MAGA-head said that he knows that it will be a bad administration, that will be incapable of doing anything right, and will likely make everything much worse than it already is. The commentator asked how can that kind of perpetual clusterf*ckery benefit this MAGA-head voter? The voter replied that it will not benefit them, however, it will hurt the people he wants to hurt. Interesting comment.
So, all the mayhem, and all the crazy that’s coming, is just a necessary weaponization against that evil Woke crowd. The MAGA voter sees himself as necessary collateral damage, so long as the evil he perceives suffers as well and is destroyed. And here we all are — everyone is in the ‘culture war’.
So, with the end of Rachel Notley’s ill-fated tenure, which was an honest effort to build a more civilized Alberta, we can all look forward to joining in on the mayhem and stupidity to come.
Rachel Notley was in a league of her own. We have not seen this calibre of a politician in Alberta, since Peter Lougheed was our premier. In fact, those in Peter Lougheed’s cabinet, were even making comparisons to him, by saying things like Rachel Notley has led like Peter Lougheed. Allan Warrick said this. Ralph Klein’s own family was so disappointed with him that they wanted him gone, and even his daughter, Angie Klein made the news in 2015, by saying she was endorsing Rachel Notley and the NDP, because she knew how bad her father was as the premier of Alberta. Other ex politicians who were a part of Peter Lougheed’s cabinet showed their displeasure with Danielle Smith and the UCP, and were getting behind Rachel Notley and the NDP. Ralph Klein was very dishonest, and a frequent commenter on your blog has said this, because he has known Ralph Klein and his family since they were approaching adulthood in the early 1960s. Danielle Smith is also very dishonest. She has a very similar nature to Ralph Klein. Cheating us out of billions of dollars, by not collecting the proper oil and tax revenues that Peter Lougheed got, millions and billions of dollars squandered on the worst types of blunders, wrecking our public education system, and our public healthcare system in Alberta, so they can be privatized, making utility and insurance costs soar to unaffordable rates, seeing poverty rates climb, putting our pensions at risk, and refusing to release the survey results, letting democracy fade away, catering to their rich friends, and desecrating the environment. I saw the X (formerly, Twitter) responses on Rachel Notley, and the majority of those comments are vile. They could be paid bots that are making those nasty comments about Rachel Notley. Newspaper comment sections are full of very repugnant comments against Rachel Notley, especially Postmedia publications. Anyone that shows disagreements with Danielle Smith and the UCP have the worst insults thrown at them. We have a horrific mess on our hands with Danielle Smith and the UCP.
I am sure Alberta voters will find a way to screw this byelection up too. Alberta is a lost cause.
I don’t think Nenshi running in that seat in a byelection would be a bad idea. He’d probably seek a nomination in a Calgary seat for the general election, but this is a fine opportunity to get him into the Legislature, where he can more directly challenge Daniellezebub.
As for his apparent radio silence of late, how much of that can be attributed to the dismal media landscape in Alberta, where Postmedia, aka the conservative movement’s house organ, dominates the “print” media landscape in the province and holds a monopoly on the big city “papers”? Could it be that the corporate media simply don’t cover him?
Jerry: I see the press releases. I’m pretty sure that, as bad as they are, Postmedia can’t be blamed for this one. DJC
Naheed Nenshi does, I am sure, visualize himself as a Calgary MLA. I expect the reason he has not asked an existing NDP MLA in Calgary to step down for him to contest the seat is he does not want to be a bad guy and disappoint someone who has been loyal to the NDP cause. No doubt doing so would also disappoint the MLA’s supporters in the riding as well. The scenario we are used to is one where the new leader becomes premier after winning the seat, and can then offer the sacrificial former MLA a perk of some sort. Sadly, the leader of the opposition can’t really make the same kind of offer.
It is interesting to think of what Mr. Nenshi’s plans are for a riding to run in in 2027. I’m guessing he is hoping one of the Calgary MLAs who was first elected in 2015 will decide that 12 years is enough, and choose to retire, rather than run again. This would give Mr. Nenshi a seat, without disappointing the MLA or his/her supporters.
Failing that, he could be hoping that by 2027 Calgarians will be fed up with Danielle Smith’s nonsensical policies and he would have a reasonable chance to take a seat from a UCP MLA, in a riding that has historically been close anyway. It would be a bit of a gamble, but if it worked it would really stick it to the UCP.
Running in a UCP riding could also come with a bit of an ulterior advantage if Naheed Nenshi turns out to have the same attitude Jim Prentice had, i.e. premier or nothing. If Mr. Nenshi was unable to turn a Calgary swing riding, it seems very likely that that would also be accompanied by another UCP election win. This would give Nenshi an easy exit from provincial politics if he had no interest in being opposition leader for another 4 years.
As one of Rachel Notley’s biggest fans, I wish Alberta’s Pipeline Queen nothing but success in her new career on Suncor’s Board of Directors.
The Trans Mountain Expansion Pipeline should have Notley’s name on it. Also, all oil spills.
Rachoil Pipeline.
Notleak #3.
Rachspill #6.
Thanks to Notley, today’s NDP now supports carbon capture and storage. Supports O&G subsidies. Supports new pipelines that sabotage Canada’s climate targets. Opposes a just transition for workers.
Under Nenshi, the reborn NDP now rejects consumer carbon pricing. Also opposes the federal greenwashing bill.
In pursuit of power, the AB NDP is ready to jettison any inconvenient progressive policy while chasing the UCP to the right.
The AB NDP — selling your grandkids down the river.
Donate now — or else.
Readers: Just to be clear, while Mr. Pounder’s sarcasm, and the irony, is irresistible, as far as I know Ms. Notley has not been offered a position on Suncor’s board. DJC
If not Suncor, perhaps Notley can continue in the footsteps of another fossil-fuel-enthusiast ex-NDP premier and become a coal baron?
Ronald: If you notice anything interesting, let me know. DJC
i’d advise the party to encourage an open nomination, and introduce candidates with strong leadership potential, to seek the seat. with the present leadership, surrounded by a weak elected and unelected supporting cast, they will be demolished in the next general.
I understand why Ms. Notley felt she had to step down after the last election; I just wish she hadn’t.
I think people forget (or failed to recognize) how close the last election really was. 7 seats, less than 6000 votes, and we would have had a 2nd NDP government. Smith actually LOST 14 seats.
80 odd years of conservative governments is a hard habit to break. I personally think Ms. Notley should have stayed for 1 more election.
If it was close, that would only be due to the vagaries of first past the post producing seat totals out of whack with intentions. The UCP got fully 52.6% of the popular vote to the NDP’s 44%. There is no use avoiding the point that well over half of Alberta voters looked at Danielle Smith and her remarkable ideas and said, More please.
Rachel Notley’s exit, like her political arc, is measured, careful, scripted, but not stilted. The arc’s beginning is her father, Grant, who led the party when it was a candle neath an ocean of right-wing government, and today, at the other end, is daughter Rachel bequeathing the largest Loyal Opposition in Alberta history. The climax in the middle is of course the NDP’s signal victory over the myopic, deaf, dumb and dumber ProgCon regime of 44 years.
The upset was as a default win for the NDP. Notley recognized it as an expression of just how outraged Albertans were at Wildrose leader Danielle Smith’s crossing the floor with half her caucus and at the ProgCon government for accepting them into its own: it’s hard to imagine how much more their anger could have possibly been registered than to elect a nominal socialist party in the longest and (hitherto) strongest right-wing province in Canada. Thus the new Premier was wisely reticent to presume the anomaly would utterly change Alberta’s partisan political landscape.
In retrospect—the single upset followed by two subsequent election losses notwithstanding—it almost looks like the jury’s still out: the right-wing is still in but measurably weakened while the left-wing is still out but measurably strengthened. Does it mean Notley was wise not to presume too much since the 2015 win?
Her legacy is immeasurable because Alberta’s future is far from written yet. The evolution of the partisan right remains a train that drags the station along with it, the wreck potential distracting from the perennial—and today the pertinent political question: does Notley leave Alberta better than she found it? And the nominal party of the left? Did Notley make it into a “neoliberal party.”
Insofar as ‘neoliberalism’ is a byword for ‘globalized investor-prioritization,’ I suppose any party might be so-labeled if it is serious about electing candidates to public office in a country that depends on global trade. However, it would be imprecise to discount the difference between a party whose strategy is to promote and protect, say, universal public healthcare, and a party which measures healthcare success by private profitability, or between a party which is tactically flexible enough to adjust course towards its strategic objective as circumstances require and one which is too ideologically hidebound and can only bulldoze straight ahead, no matter the cost—including risk of failure. Of course this allusion is to the NDP which supports robust public healthcare and the UCP which doesn’t. If they are both neoliberal, if the analytical resolution cannot distinguish one from the other, then they may be labeled “neoliberal,” but only imprecisely.
Analytical kurtosis is inaccuracy—that is, by blocking all partisan labels onto one spectrum, not just schematically, but also categorically. Preserving and promoting anything, such as the NDP does with respect social investment, is otherwise what traditional conservatives do, reminding that socialism and conservatism are two species of the generic communitarian spectrum: trade unions, for example, are extremely conservative about seniority while Red Tories are fairly socialistic about public spending. Liberalism, however, is mistaken for the centre where the two wings overlap. In Alberta, liberalism intersects the spectrum on the far right as anti-government libertarianism, not in between the left and right, but instead to the right of centre-right. Recall Liberal JT outflanked socialist NDP’s Thomas Mulcair on the left for the win in 2015. Liberalism and its derivatives, neoliberalism and libertarianism, are not ideally communitarian, circumstances rather dictating where they might intersect, rather than parallel or overlap, the communitarian spectrum. It’s tantalizing to max-out the maxim that perhaps Rachel Notley’s NDP should have campaigned from the right but governed from the left—but such flippancy would have only amplified the criticism she was bound to get. And did get.
While Lougheed’s ProgCons boldly promoted patently Red Tory prudence in taxing high-quality but limited reservoirs of conventional oil for the predictable ‘rainy day’ when it ran out, the circumstances for Notley, not her party’s ideology, dictated that the much more problematic bitumen industry (problematic because there’s too much of it, not too little of it like conventional oil was) do not afford such bold moves. Alberta’s substantial growth since the 1970s is increasingly dependant on bitumen mining and export so any responsible government must be careful with policy that might upset bitumen’s much more wobbly situation, climate change, downwind air-shed pollution, federal emissions-reduction targets, indigenous land claims, petroleum markets ‘n’ all.
One of the major criticisms of Notley’s government came from the more idealistic, long-suffering faction of her own party which wanted bolder reforms imposed, tout de suite, on Big Bitumen. It was, I believe, this criticism from the left which spooked the partisan right that she might buckle under pressure from the more-idealistic faction and betray her strategy of prudently maintaining the status quo, at least for the while. If the NDP was to expand upon its good fortune, she reasoned that gently persuading the suspicious, habitually antagonistic right-wing of the electorate was essential and would take a while. Conversely, K-Boy’s Blue-truck, White-knight and benightedly divisive campaign was panicky and imprudent, but splashy enough to succeed in 2019. Yet keeping several times the number of seats in the 2019 defeat than the NDP had traditionally held before 2015, and forming the strongest Opposition Albertans had had for generations indicated that many erstwhile conservative voters approved of Notley’s easy-does-it-on-Big-B strategy. And it’s true that many Red Tories moved to the NDP—but that doesn’t necessarily mean it had become a neoliberal party.
But Notley’s caution only made Dipper idealists accuse her of ‘pulling-the-party-to-the-right’. To keep converted Tories’ crucial custom in order to have any hope of regaining power, her 2023 campaign kept an even keel with regard bitumen (including the carbon tax to which many erstwhile Tory voters proved more amenable than the hair-on-fire fear-mongers of the furthering-right would have us believe). It was tactically correct, the strategy demonstrably approved, and it should have won her the election.
I’m reminded of BC’s single NDP government—it’s first, in fact, in 1972 after beating another long-running party of the right (which had taken a page really just one, the party name, from Alberta’s right-wing politics), WAC Bennet’s 20-year Socred regime. Unlike Notley’s first, NDP Premier Dave Barrett was much more bold in tackling BC’s very conservative institutions of the day, in forestry, mining, dam-building, and blacktop-laying, &c. Barrett’s government was astoundingly productive in the Legislative Assembly, passing hundreds of bills into law every year of its three-year term. I’m tempted to say: see what happens when you get too bold right off the bat? Barrett irrevocably changed BC by implementing public auto insurance, the Agricultural Land Reserve, the Islands Trust, the Ombudsman, and too many others to mention—all vehemently condemned by the rookie Opposition Socreds who vowed to undo everything the NDP “socialist hordes” had done (after 18 more years of Socred and 16 years of far-right BC “Liberal” governments, ICBC, the ALR, and the Islands Trust are still here today). In his zeal to remake the whole province, Barrett started taking fire from behind and, daring the then-far-left labour union faction of the party to take him down, he called a snap election in 1975. And lost. Kaboom!
Unlike the prospects for Alberta’s post-first-NDP government, BC’s sat in the wilderness for nearly two decades after that 1975 defeat; it governed for a decade in the 90s when another overzealous Premier got the party reduced to just two seats, ushering in 16 more years of the most damaging governance BC ever had. Take my advice, my Alberta friends: appreciate a more measured and cautious approach to changing the world: you’ll probably get there faster by going slower and steadier.
Unfortunately the other criticism of Rachel Notley’s leadership —really, the only other one—probably jinxed the NDP’s chances in 2023, not so much that putting a pittance of a surtax on the wealthiest of the wealthy is bad policy, but mentioning it at such a crucial juncture on campaign simply proved in the minds of achingly few that she had indeed buckled to the farther-left faction—just like the naysayers warned— and therefore would probably do it again with regard bitumen and other social justice issues the furthering right freaks out about. And the jury’s 2023 verdict seems to have been: yes, Alberta’s partisan political landscape has utterly changed, but this time in a way that can justifiably be called ‘overzealous.’
But, believe it or not, that’s probably a good thing. Change is always happening, but there’s no doubt about it in Alberta— except maybe, on the left which seems to have remained as passively cranky as ever despite Rachel Notley’s sterling service to the party and the province. Forgivable, I suppose, since the Dippers are still fairly wet behind the ears with respect opportunities to win power—which their outgoing leader vastly improved by taking careful, measured advantage of an unexpected gift. They’ve only just elected the second leader in the party’s history to have a serious shot at regaining government, at breaking the Smith&Parker Gang’s drunken, shoot’em up rampage and setting Alberta on a new and better course for all its citizens and all of Canada. And that would be a change, of course, except not so different than that seminal victory that came out of nowhere but was wisely nurtured and patiently awaits fruition—whatever pundits want to label it.
Thank you, Premier Notley!
This is the 30th. day of December. Tonight the sun will set on two generations of Notley’s in Alberta. So I want to send blessings to Grant and Sandy, and Premier Notley. Madam Premier, you have distinguished yourself and lifted sagging spirits throughout your career. May your future be brighter than our prospects as beleaguered Albertans.
With a heavy heart but a bountiful treasury of cherished memories.