Naheed Nenshi needs to get his elbows up

Naheed Nenshi isn’t used to asking for the spotlight. The Alberta NDP leader's unique brand of politics — politics in full sentences — made him an overnight sensation after he won the 2010 Calgary mayoral election, and he’s been able to count on the interest of journalists in Alberta and abroad ever since. Now, after winning the Alberta NDP leadership in a walk, he finds himself in a most unusual position: being ignored. 

This isn’t entirely his fault. When it comes to attracting attention, he’s a bit of a victim of his own past success, given how easily it came. But the media environment at the provincial level is fundamentally different from the one he experienced as mayor of Calgary, and it’s inherently hostile to the NDP and its representatives. The UCP has its own call-in radio show, along with a network of highly supportive media outlets, from the Edmonton Journal and Calgary Herald to the Western Standard and other online publications. 

As the leader of the official opposition, he’s naturally going to get less media exposure than Premier Danielle Smith — especially when she is forever starting new political fires at the local, national and international level. And without a seat in the provincial legislature, it’s that much harder for Nenshi to capture the media’s attention or produce a clip that goes viral on social media. 

Then again, some of these problems are of his own making. The decision not to force one of his Calgary MLAs to resign and clear a seat as soon as he won the leadership has clearly hurt him, as will being forced to run in Rachel Notley’s old riding in Edmonton-Strathcona, rather than representing a Calgary riding. The NDP, after all, already has all the seats in Edmonton. The ones it needs to win the next election are located in Calgary and the surrounding area. Running in the safest seat in Alberta for a New Democrat is not exactly an impressive show of strength. 

Nenshi is also responsible for the ongoing failure to create his own political weather and communicate more effectively. His conspicuously sporadic interventions on social media — often congratulating community groups or local schools — sound more like those of someone running for mayor of Alberta than premier. 

Even when Nenshi does get into the partisan fray, he often sounds more like a recovering Conservative than a New Democrat. Nowhere is this more apparent than on energy and climate, where his positions are largely indistinguishable from the UCP government. He has floated the idea of treating LNG exports as climate policy, one that’s been widely and repeatedly debunked by people who actually know things about the issue. And when the carbon tax was cancelled by Prime Minister Mark Carney, he echoed the false Conservative framing about its impacts on affordability. “The removal will help many people in the midst of a cost-of-living crisis under this UCP government,” he said. 

To be clear, the only people its removal will help are those at the very top of the income scale, as the PBO’s reports have shown repeatedly. The people its removal will hurt most are, in fact, the lowest income earners, those already adversely affected by said cost-of-living crisis — and those the NDP is supposed to represent most vociferously. It’s one thing for a UCP MLA to trot out this sort of economically illiterate nonsense. It’s quite another when it comes from the leader of the Alberta NDP. 

Whatever he’s trying to do, it’s clearly not working. The most recent provincial polling has the UCP with a double-digit lead and on track for a crushing victory in 2027, one far bigger than it earned in the 2023 provincial election. This at a time when the UCP government is caught up in an ever-expanding scandal over its handling of the healthcare system, involving potential corruption at the highest level. This at a time when Premier Danielle Smith is openly flirting with disloyalty and breaking with the “Team Canada” approach that has united the rest of the country against Donald Trump’s threats. She’s even travelling to Florida later this month to appear at a conference hosted by the America-first PragerU. 

Just this week, in fact, she told reporters that she views Trump and the Liberal government that bought her province a pipeline as equally dangerous. “I would say that we face a dual threat. Yes, we have to deal with the tariffs, but we also equally have to deal with a federal Liberal government that has tried to crush our economy for the past 10 years.” On this, as on too many things, Nenshi has been largely invisible. 

It’s time for him and his party to get their collective elbows up. Only 15 per cent of Albertans support the idea of Canada becoming America’s 51st state, but you can be sure that every single one is a UCP voter. It’s a safe bet that a few of them, like Coutts border blockader Marco Van Huigenbos, are even sitting on some UCP riding executives right now. And if Mark Carney’s Liberals win the federal election, expected to begin in a matter of days, that 15 per cent will get even noisier. 

Nenshi’s NDP needs to stop pussyfooting around here. It needs to demand that Smith’s government stop attacking Canada and start defending it against Trump’s threats. It needs to more consistently call out the victimhood narrative being perpetuated by the UCP, one that suggests federal efforts to address climate change are directly responsible for all of Alberta’s economic woes. And it needs to remember that calling the question about where Smith’s loyalties lie will work in the NDP’s favour, since people living in Alberta’s cities and towns — the places it needs to win seats — are far less likely to support her treason-curious approach. 

More than anything, though, Nenshi’s NDP needs to do something. If it doesn't, it's handing the next election to a provincial government that’s eminently beatable — and seems almost determined at times to defeat itself. But that won’t happen on its own, and it definitely won’t happen if Naheed Nenshi can’t break through with a public whose attention he may have taken for granted.