Tomorrow is by-election day in Calgary-Shaw. Voters in that riding in the city’s far south will have an opportunity not just to spank the United Conservative Party of Premier Danielle Smith for its devotion to private health care, open-pit coal mining, AI data centres and questionable ethics, but to send a message to Donald Trump in Washington and his MAGAfied Alberta separatist allies about their efforts to break up Canada.
Calgary-Shaw voters can do that by electing the Kyle Campbell, the candidate for the Opposition NDP, the only party in the contest with both an unambiguously pro-Canadian platform and a chance of winning.
Cabinet ministers from the governing United Conservative Party, which is nowadays dominated by Alberta separatists, have been flooding into the riding to ensure that doesn’t happen. And UCP candidate Mike Derry, despite being neither the party’s preferred choice nor a moderate conservative with broad appeal to voters, is favored to win just the same.
After all, since its creation in the 1986 boundary redistribution, Calgary-Shaw has only once failed to elect a Conservative. That was in 2015, the year of the Orange Wave that saw an NDP majority government under Rachel Notley elected. Former Calgary-Shaw MLA and UCP cabinet minister Rebecca Schulz, whose resignation took effect on Jan. 2, won with commanding leads in the general elections of 2019 and 2023.
Nevertheless, Mr. Derry’s candidacy comes with baggage – in particular, long association with a number of notorious far-right figures who once dwelt on the fringes of Alberta politics but under the UCP have been creeping toward the centre. His LinkedIn résumé indicates he is a “talent management systems and process consultant” and an immigration adviser.
Mr. Campbell is an employee benefits manager with a Calgary-based financial services company. He lives in the riding. Moreover, the NDP posted big gains in the riding in the 2023 election, although not enough to overcome Ms. Schulz. Still, either party’s candidate could win tomorrow.
One would think Premier Smith’s paradoxical devotion to ensuring a chaotic and divisive separation referendum takes place on Oct. 19 while claiming to hope Alberta remains in Canada would be a potent issue in the minds of Calgary-Shaw voters. Provincial polls, nevertheless, suggest the UCP maintains its lead.
But if you expect Ms. Smith to campaign openly for a united Canada now or in the lead-up to the referendum, as NDP Leader Naheed Nenshi is able to do, she is “too trapped by the separatists in her UCP and her caucus,” as Postmedia political columnist Don Braid explained the premier’s dilemma in a column on Friday. This assumes, of course, that Ms. Smith is not in fact a covert supporter of separation.
“The most federalists can expect is Smith’s personal promise to vote against leaving Canada,” Mr. Braid wrote. “But cheerleading? Real passion for Canada? Bows to the greatness of this incredible country? Full-throated praise for Ottawa’s many policy reversals in Alberta’s favour? Unlikely. The premier is stuck in her web of ambiguity.”
This prompted a nearly hysterical response by Premier Smith’s chief of staff, a frequent visitor to the social media hellsite previously known as Twitter. “Absolute garbage column,” Rob Anderson snarled.
“The problem with lefties like Nenshi, Braid and (Forever Canadian campaign leader and former Conservative deputy premier Thomas) Lukaszuk is they talk a big game about national unity, but they do the square root of jack squat to help acknowledge and address the grievances underlying the problems that have alienated so many Albertans,” Mr. Anderson barked. “And then they vilify the one who is. Predictable, Hypocritical and Pathetic …”
Since Mr. Anderson is one of the authors of the separatist “Free Alberta Strategy,” which Ms. Smith seems to have been following closely throughout her tenure as premier, one can safely assume the he understands Mr. Braid pretty well nailed the inherent contradiction in Premier Smith’s position.
Neither Mr. Braid nor Mr. Lukaszuk can be described as Lefties, by the way. Mr. Nenshi only qualifies ex officio, one might say, now that the Alberta NDP has become in effect a progressive conservative party. Mr. Nenshi is also a former mayor of Calgary, which from the UCP perspective is apparently an automatic indicator of wokeness, as the city’s current conservative mayor has discovered.
Whether or not it turns out to be a referendum on the referendum, it is inevitable that this by-election will be seen as a test for both Ms. Smith and Mr. Nenshi, lending it a zero-sum quality with a clear winner and loser that is bound to have future repercussions for the two leaders.
If the NDP’s Mr. Campbell wins, the widespread perception of Mr. Nenshi as passive, disengaged and nowhere-to-be-seen will likely change. If the NDP candidate loses, restive party members are sure to ask unhappily how any leader could do badly against a government widely seen as corrupt, incompetent, beholden to a lunatic MAGA fringe, and tied to policies unpopular with significant parts of its own base.
As political commentator Dave Cournoyer summarized the NDP leader’s situation yesterday, “Nenshi’s ability to increase the NDP’s support in Calgary, even in likely UCP-voting ridings like Calgary-Shaw, will determine whether the opposition party could have path to victory in the next election. It will also be an indicator of whether the broad voter coalition built by former leader Rachel Notley in the 2023 election has sustained itself since the former leader stepped down two years ago.”
If Mr. Derry loses, Premier Smith’s success holding together a voting coalition of traditional conservatives and MAGA-influenced separatists will be in doubt. A loss could very well could open the door to palace-coup attempts and new vote-splitting right-wing parties, an Alberta tradition that for the past few years the UCP has been able to keep in check.
Remember too that the tradition of skidding leaders who threaten the party’s domination of Alberta politics remains embedded in the UCP’s political DNA. If for any reason Ms. Smith starts to look like a loser, ever a potential one, her days will be numbered.
We await tomorrow’s results with … interest.
NOTE: To the other candidates in the riding – Independent Rolly Ashdown, Progressive Tory Kyle Joseph and Liberal John Roggeveen – my apologies for paying so little attention to your campaigns. You are all, I am sure, in it for honourable reasons. Alas, aside from a small potential for vote-splitting, this time it’s hard to see how any of you can be significant players. DJC