It seems that the NDP Leadership Race Approvals Committee will soon have to make a very consequential decision: will they open the door to Naheed Nenshi to run for the party’s leadership? The rules for the leadership contest say that, to run, a candidate must have been a member of the party six months ago. But they leave some room for discretion: a potential candidate who did not hold a party membership can apply.
I think it would be a good thing for the NDP's future to 'have it out' on policy directions by allowing Nenshi to articulate the vision he has and then firmly building on it with other leadership candidates coming out with their visions on multiple issues, in 'full sentences'. At the least, it will enhance attention to the race and positions.
Remember Ed? Although Federal, Ed saw being a Social Democrat and gaining power in government as being possible (NDP has been in Government and Notley today reflected how she needed to listen to rural Albertans more - a balanced leader). There are other talented people also in our province.
Even Notley, who sometimes disagreed with the Federal Party, never severed her NDP ethos or suggested name changes. I still believe, maybe my utopian vision, that people want and can support reasonable and balanced government.
Showing consistency in a movement is not momentary but requires some time to gain respect and understanding.
If Nenshi truly wants to be a new leader he will need to be true to who he is?
I was raised by a trade union leader and life long organizer who was a founding member at the first NDP convention. Things have evolved since then but some things are the same. Concern for the working person, care for the most vulnerable and a hope for a society that cares for each other.
Very thoughtful piece. Reasonable and balanced, as you suggest, can mean you can agree to disagree without being disagreeable. It can also mean, despite differences finding common ground, while at times requiring some flexibility.
Diefenbaker/ Pearson/Tommy Douglas finding a way to find travel through the mine fields of Bill of Rights, Universal Healthcare, the Canadian flag. Not all people in all parties agreed(even in their own party) with everything but being balanced was to participate in the political process following (hopefully) your conscience and knowing you still have the ability to have a voice another day.
Looking at history, even in the CCF there was disagreement in the party regarding War. Woodsworth was a passionate pacifist not accepted by the party. When he went to parliament against the party he was encouraged to speak. PM King rouse(who disagreed with Woodhouse) but said, your a man that we respect who follows his conscious and you are an ornament to parliament.
Democracy is an attempt at being balanced and reasonable by coming together with different views when there can be a differentiation of consciousness but a common core of respect for the dignity of all. This might sound like generalization but it is a mentality that is open to learning and growth and a common bond for all.
It seems to me that Rachel Notley already has led the provincial NDs toward a purplish stance, just as Jack Layton did for the federal NDs. So I don't see it being a stretch for Nemshi to fit in with the current Alberta NDs.
Thank you for this quick sharing of what is facing the ABNDP. I have long argued against our becoming a two party landscape anywhere in Canada, and have argued that a number of diverse parties is essential to voices being heard. I have stated often that we should not go down the path of binary opposition that exists in American politics which has lead to us/them, antagonism, flip-flopping, and ultimately, ungovernability. Proportional representation for its many voices is always the better thing in my mind-but we can’t seem to get to it.
“Contagion from the left” has served Canadians VERY well throughout our history, and holding the BALANCE of power might have been better for advancing our causes than holding power ever could have been.
That said— and only in Alberta’s case— I’ve enthusiastically embraced the move to a more centrist spot by the NDP on the political spectrum (as Ms. Notley has so aptly taken us).
In Alberta, there is not that opportunity to advance better ideas through opposition status or contagion from the left. We must seek power.
So what are our realities in this time and place? I enthusiastically support the inclusion of “purple” (and all progressives) into our fold. We have “modern” challenges; we can’t fix our problems of society by employing the same “old” practices. We New Democrats have always been attuned to social challenges, but we now face another level of challenges —maybe greater, certainly more ominous: messaging/media control and fake news; anti-democratic forces; erosion of the Rule of Law; stripping of rights; and a further concentration of wealth and power to some pretty awful people.
We progressives cannot fight malevolence only with our love and good intentions. Yet, we cannot stoop to their antics— or we become them.
At this point the only “weapon” I see is our vote— and we haven’t as New Democrats sufficient numbers USUALLY to gain power. If ever there were a time, I believe it is now, for progressives to come together in solidarity to defeat the most regressive party that is FULL of mean-spiritedness.
Would we risk imploding? I think not, but what do I know. Progressives do not typically “eat their young” as Conservatives do. All progressives have a caring at heart, and a sense that none of us make it until we all have made it (idealistic and naive, I know, but a very good carrot to follow nonetheless.)
As for Mr. Nenshi, I could not be happier than to support a man of this calibre! Of all his great attributes, I am happiest that his heart is in the right place. And wow, that our party could have Notleys and a Nenshi confirms that I’m situated in the best of parties. Orange and purple are my new colours
Thanks Lisa, always a pleasure to read your 'epistles to the hopeful.' :-)
The success of Mr. Nenshi's bid for a leadership candidacy of the NDP appears to rest on whether the party at its bedrock level is hidebound doctrinaire or more progressive and pragmatic. Which is more important: a new leader who can challenge the concretion that is the UCP, or stubborn adherence to an arbitrary rule that would make them appear more like the party they oppose? I don't know whether Nenshi is the answer or perhaps even just a segue, but I don't know of a better option right now. I'd be willing to opt for the former if the alternative is more of Danielle Smith's duplicity and lack of a sense of priority for the 21st Century.
It has an Obama-like energy, a genuinely NEW element beyond the fray with NO baggage owing to a solid, successful affiliation with municipal politics (the guy was even recognized world-wide as a mayor) the one strata that still seems to be working, and working well.
Look what's just happened in Toronto where a very socialist mayor says, standing behind Chrystia Freeland, that the federal government has totally "showed UP" for her city, thereby making a large tax hike unnecessary.
And although I'm loathe to say it, I think a man has a better chance here at this point.
If the NDP succumb to their tribal tendencies and shut him out, even when he could probably write his own ticket on his next political move as a WINNER, it will project more parity with the cons, enemy of us all, in its closed mindedness.
I am ambivalent on Nahid Nenshi as leader of the NDP. ( he may already be a member).
He is a good leader, but could he breach the rural and urban divide?
One, since Health Care is important …perhaps David Shepherd might be good? I hate to see a good Medical doctor taken out of medical service to politics. But given the disarray of the UCP, David might be the one to bring it back?
Health Care is a concern for both rural and urban voters.
There are several other youthful candidates within the NDP who would make good leaders too.
In Calgary, Orange and Purple mix very well. There are a huge number of voters that supported both Nenshi and Rachel Notley's NDP. It does raise two questions. Would NDP supporters in Edmonton support this as well? And would Nenshi have the ability to expand the NDP outside of their two urban strongholds into the rest of Alberta?
I’m not clear about your citation that “the Conservatives” were one of the parties strengthened by a merger of two.
In both the federal and Alberta cases the respective Conservative parties merely adopted the prefix “Progressive” in order to advertise their party’s new socially progressive policies—although it took 15 years for the federal PCs to be rewarded: John Diefenbaker’s 1957 landslide victory (which did result in the Bill of Rights and a white paper recommending universal public healthcare); the electoral love started to fizzle after only a single term.
It’s an easy case to make that the Alberta PCs were strengthened by this sort-of-merger (at least of names, if not registered parties): it eventually won power and kept it for 44 years. But these weren’t really mergers of two parties.
For decades the BC Conservatives affected an ad hoc alliance with the Liberals to counter the socialist Co-operative Commonwealth Federation; when the CCF won more seats than the Conservatives in 1941, the business community urged the two parties formalize the de facto coalition, the governing Liberals acceded to the idea, and an actual merger was sealed. Like the federal and Alberta Conservatives, the BC party adopted the prefix “Progressive” in 1942. Whatever strength it garnered by this merger was tapped-out by 1952 when renegade Conservative MLA, WAC Bennett, won power as leader of the Social Credit party which governed for almost three decades (save for a three-year hiatus under the NDP in the early 70s). Eventually the Conservative and Liberal parties vanished altogether. This is one case when two anti-socialist parties were strengthened by merging.
Preston Manning and Lucien Bouchard smashed Brian Mulroney’s federal PC party—a kind of “merger” between regional conservatives: it was reduced to just two seats in 1993. Manning tried to reunite the right under a new party name, the Canadian Alliance, but failed to win over the rump PC party—which is hardly the merger he was looking for. In 2003 the newly-elected leaders of the CA and PCs, Stephen Harper and Peter MacKay, made a treacherous deal to merge the two parties (which MacKay had promised the PC membership he would never do in return for their leadership support). By 2006 the new CPC was government. But was it really strengthened?
The merged CPC won only a minority in 2006 due almost entirely to the collapse of the Liberal vote —that is, the CPC victory was really by default, not strength. Harper’s first-term government holds the record for the least legislatively-productive parliament in Canadian history. Again it won only a minority in 2008. Finally, in 2011, Harper won the CPC’s first and last majority (this time the Liberal default rewarded the NDP which became Loyal Opposition for the very first time), marking the zenith of CPC popularity at 41% of the popular vote— which steadily diminished in the next three elections. The party has had three leaders since the Liberals won back power in 2015. Although under its current leader, Pierre Poilievre, the CPC is more popular than the governing Liberal minority (backed by the NDP), these popularity surveys, for what they’re worth, are more attributable to hate than love. The next election isn’t until October, 2025, and, even though the electorate is in a hot and bothered mood at the moment, there is no guarantee the CPC with retake power by then. In any case, it seems more likely that if the CPC wins in a year and a half from now, it will be another case of default, not love for the CPC—and probably a minority, too. That party has never been loved: how much strength has the CPC garnered since its merger in 2003?
The partisan right in the ROC+Q is shown in less than flattering light (perhaps Nova Scotia’s PC government is the only exception). Ontario’s Big Blue machine is plagued by scandal; Manitoba’s PCs lost the recent election to the NDP; Quebec’s partisan right, like every party in La Belle Province, sits on an knife-edge, knowing full well what its electorate does when it gets agitated; New Brunswick and Saskatchewan’s parties of the right, both in power, have picked fairly irrelevant but highly contentious issues to run on in their respective election campaigns scheduled for October of this year. It’s arguable that picking a fight over gender issues as both have done are attempts to distract from more important issues, a sign of weakness, not strength. But of course none of these parties is the product of merger.
Rather look to Alberta where Jason Kenney untied the right—an hostile merger if ever there was one— after the NDP won an upset victory that terminated the 44 year-old PC regime in 2015. He went on to win the PC leadership ( still under RCMP investigation) whence he merged the party with the farther-right Wild Rose party to form the Untied Conservative Party. It won power in 2019. Kenney then went on to become the least popular premier in Canada and eventually resigned after getting only 51% approval from the voting membership. Is that strength? The party whose sutures were barely set seems set to tear itself in two between old PC moderates and the radical Take Back Alberta faction. Strength? Danielle Smith won the leadership contest with 53% of voting members, stumbled through gaff after gaff until last spring’s election which the UCP won but but a very thin margin (while the NDP continued to build the largest Loyal Opposition in Alberta history). More Strength? Depends how one counts a few thousand votes in a handful of Calgary ridings.
Seemingly not to be outdone, Smith recently announced highly contentious policy on gender rights for school-aged citizens—something similar to, but more draconian than either Saskatchewan’s or NB’s (Poilievre, prays every night beside his bed that Smith won’t drag him into this mess). Yet, unlike the other two, Smith’s odious move will hardly distract from the other policy announcements which are, almost incredibly, even more unpopular with Albertans.
Just like the merger that created the CPC, the one which shotgun-wedded the UCP looks wobbly, at best. Any party which harbours mutually repelled factions cannot be called ‘strong’—“A house divided…” The merger of the PC and WR parties might have won back-to-back elections, but both were stewed in controversy and Albertans, never mind Canadians, have proved to be less and less friendly to the UCP which, since winning last May, has earned disapproval for most of its major policies. How to spend political capital doesn’t seem to be the merged UCP’s strong point.
Kenney only made it halfway through his first term as UCP leader. How long will Danielle Smith last? Just asking this, quite legitimately, does not indicate UCP strength—quite the opposite in fact. For most politicians, having three and a half years to go before the next election is a blessing, but in Danielle’s case it is a curse.
Does the ProgCon/Wild Rose “merger” —if it could be called that—compare to a potential one between Naheed Nenshi’s Calgary supporters and the NDP? The singular fact is that neither is conservative nor is saddled with extreme factions (although not having socialist bona fides might make Nenshi persona non grata to some Dipper ideologues). In contrast, factions of the right are uncomfortably ligatured together in a bundle of rods and battle axes. What’s that saying about—‘ if you’re a hammer everything looks like a nail’?
We might conclude that, whatever party mergers are worth, they don’t seem to work for parties of the right. Virtually everywhere we look in the Western World, right-wing parties are barely holding their members together while trying to appease dichotomies within their ranks that distrust and dislike each other. Just look at the tRumpublican mess in the USA.
Insofar as parliamentary alliances could be called merger-light, the most successful of those appear to be the Liberal-Dipper alliance in the HoC and the former Green-Dipper alliance in BC.
Nominally “conservative” parties of the right are weakened whatever they do because none of that is what citizens want—a fair society and a healthy environment. All of them (save, maybe, Nova Scotia’s) are nearly falling apart under the strain of factionalism and extremism. The once-powerful BC Liberal party which ruled for 16 years has fallen to just barely north of single-digit popularity since losing the 2017 and 2020 elections; the incumbent NDP government has 99% odds of winning a majority again in October while the long-forgotten BC Conservatives have reappeared, proudly relieved of the weak Liberal faction once allied with one of the farthest-right governments Canada ever had. It’s so bad that the BC Liberals had to change their name and now poll at just 12% while the BC Conservatives ride at an amazing 17%—and, even more amazingly, tied with the Greens. Now that’s a picture of the partisan right falling apart. Step right up, come on in, would you like to see the grand tour?
Perhaps the most strengthening merger ever really was the Canadian Federation of Labour and the CCF. Well, “strength” in a manner of speaking: the NDP has never come close to winning federal power. Perhaps Alberta’s next government will be a de facto merger of Notley “socialists”, Nenshi’s “centrists” and who-knows-who’s erstwhile ProgCons. You just never know, these days.
It would be somewhat, er, funny if both major parties had leaders who didn’t formally meet the qualifications their party set for their leadership races. Yet if Nenshi runs and wins, that is precisely what we’d have.
I’ll add this: If our political parties weren’t so weak, neither Nenshi nor Smith would be permitted to run for leadership. Yet another example of declining institutions that is harming democracy and government.
Another plus for Nenshi is that when he left the city didn't snap back toward the default conservatism in the usual fashion; Jyoti Gondek is a solid progressive.
Played right, his extremely urban political history could be a major advantage, not a disadvantage. He has no history to fight against. It leaves him free to make promises and policies without having to worry about past positions.
Give the farmers and rural communities anything (economic) they want. His urban base certainly doesn’t care if he does. He could run separate urban/rural campaigns in a way that would be very difficult for any other candidate.
Purple was the NDP’s official colour from 1984 to 2004, so maybe it’s not too far off…
I think it would be a good thing for the NDP's future to 'have it out' on policy directions by allowing Nenshi to articulate the vision he has and then firmly building on it with other leadership candidates coming out with their visions on multiple issues, in 'full sentences'. At the least, it will enhance attention to the race and positions.
If only we could be so lucky!
Remember Ed? Although Federal, Ed saw being a Social Democrat and gaining power in government as being possible (NDP has been in Government and Notley today reflected how she needed to listen to rural Albertans more - a balanced leader). There are other talented people also in our province.
Even Notley, who sometimes disagreed with the Federal Party, never severed her NDP ethos or suggested name changes. I still believe, maybe my utopian vision, that people want and can support reasonable and balanced government.
Showing consistency in a movement is not momentary but requires some time to gain respect and understanding.
If Nenshi truly wants to be a new leader he will need to be true to who he is?
I was raised by a trade union leader and life long organizer who was a founding member at the first NDP convention. Things have evolved since then but some things are the same. Concern for the working person, care for the most vulnerable and a hope for a society that cares for each other.
Sorry for the sermon.
Very thoughtful piece. Reasonable and balanced, as you suggest, can mean you can agree to disagree without being disagreeable. It can also mean, despite differences finding common ground, while at times requiring some flexibility.
Diefenbaker/ Pearson/Tommy Douglas finding a way to find travel through the mine fields of Bill of Rights, Universal Healthcare, the Canadian flag. Not all people in all parties agreed(even in their own party) with everything but being balanced was to participate in the political process following (hopefully) your conscience and knowing you still have the ability to have a voice another day.
Looking at history, even in the CCF there was disagreement in the party regarding War. Woodsworth was a passionate pacifist not accepted by the party. When he went to parliament against the party he was encouraged to speak. PM King rouse(who disagreed with Woodhouse) but said, your a man that we respect who follows his conscious and you are an ornament to parliament.
Democracy is an attempt at being balanced and reasonable by coming together with different views when there can be a differentiation of consciousness but a common core of respect for the dignity of all. This might sound like generalization but it is a mentality that is open to learning and growth and a common bond for all.
You raise excellent commentary..
It seems to me that Rachel Notley already has led the provincial NDs toward a purplish stance, just as Jack Layton did for the federal NDs. So I don't see it being a stretch for Nemshi to fit in with the current Alberta NDs.
Thank you for this quick sharing of what is facing the ABNDP. I have long argued against our becoming a two party landscape anywhere in Canada, and have argued that a number of diverse parties is essential to voices being heard. I have stated often that we should not go down the path of binary opposition that exists in American politics which has lead to us/them, antagonism, flip-flopping, and ultimately, ungovernability. Proportional representation for its many voices is always the better thing in my mind-but we can’t seem to get to it.
“Contagion from the left” has served Canadians VERY well throughout our history, and holding the BALANCE of power might have been better for advancing our causes than holding power ever could have been.
That said— and only in Alberta’s case— I’ve enthusiastically embraced the move to a more centrist spot by the NDP on the political spectrum (as Ms. Notley has so aptly taken us).
In Alberta, there is not that opportunity to advance better ideas through opposition status or contagion from the left. We must seek power.
So what are our realities in this time and place? I enthusiastically support the inclusion of “purple” (and all progressives) into our fold. We have “modern” challenges; we can’t fix our problems of society by employing the same “old” practices. We New Democrats have always been attuned to social challenges, but we now face another level of challenges —maybe greater, certainly more ominous: messaging/media control and fake news; anti-democratic forces; erosion of the Rule of Law; stripping of rights; and a further concentration of wealth and power to some pretty awful people.
We progressives cannot fight malevolence only with our love and good intentions. Yet, we cannot stoop to their antics— or we become them.
At this point the only “weapon” I see is our vote— and we haven’t as New Democrats sufficient numbers USUALLY to gain power. If ever there were a time, I believe it is now, for progressives to come together in solidarity to defeat the most regressive party that is FULL of mean-spiritedness.
Would we risk imploding? I think not, but what do I know. Progressives do not typically “eat their young” as Conservatives do. All progressives have a caring at heart, and a sense that none of us make it until we all have made it (idealistic and naive, I know, but a very good carrot to follow nonetheless.)
As for Mr. Nenshi, I could not be happier than to support a man of this calibre! Of all his great attributes, I am happiest that his heart is in the right place. And wow, that our party could have Notleys and a Nenshi confirms that I’m situated in the best of parties. Orange and purple are my new colours
Thanks Lisa, always a pleasure to read your 'epistles to the hopeful.' :-)
The success of Mr. Nenshi's bid for a leadership candidacy of the NDP appears to rest on whether the party at its bedrock level is hidebound doctrinaire or more progressive and pragmatic. Which is more important: a new leader who can challenge the concretion that is the UCP, or stubborn adherence to an arbitrary rule that would make them appear more like the party they oppose? I don't know whether Nenshi is the answer or perhaps even just a segue, but I don't know of a better option right now. I'd be willing to opt for the former if the alternative is more of Danielle Smith's duplicity and lack of a sense of priority for the 21st Century.
Love this idea!
It has an Obama-like energy, a genuinely NEW element beyond the fray with NO baggage owing to a solid, successful affiliation with municipal politics (the guy was even recognized world-wide as a mayor) the one strata that still seems to be working, and working well.
Look what's just happened in Toronto where a very socialist mayor says, standing behind Chrystia Freeland, that the federal government has totally "showed UP" for her city, thereby making a large tax hike unnecessary.
And although I'm loathe to say it, I think a man has a better chance here at this point.
If the NDP succumb to their tribal tendencies and shut him out, even when he could probably write his own ticket on his next political move as a WINNER, it will project more parity with the cons, enemy of us all, in its closed mindedness.
Yes, yes yes!! I loved him as mayor and he would be a great Premier!
I am ambivalent on Nahid Nenshi as leader of the NDP. ( he may already be a member).
He is a good leader, but could he breach the rural and urban divide?
One, since Health Care is important …perhaps David Shepherd might be good? I hate to see a good Medical doctor taken out of medical service to politics. But given the disarray of the UCP, David might be the one to bring it back?
Health Care is a concern for both rural and urban voters.
There are several other youthful candidates within the NDP who would make good leaders too.
Just my thoughts of the moment.
In Calgary, Orange and Purple mix very well. There are a huge number of voters that supported both Nenshi and Rachel Notley's NDP. It does raise two questions. Would NDP supporters in Edmonton support this as well? And would Nenshi have the ability to expand the NDP outside of their two urban strongholds into the rest of Alberta?
I’m not clear about your citation that “the Conservatives” were one of the parties strengthened by a merger of two.
In both the federal and Alberta cases the respective Conservative parties merely adopted the prefix “Progressive” in order to advertise their party’s new socially progressive policies—although it took 15 years for the federal PCs to be rewarded: John Diefenbaker’s 1957 landslide victory (which did result in the Bill of Rights and a white paper recommending universal public healthcare); the electoral love started to fizzle after only a single term.
It’s an easy case to make that the Alberta PCs were strengthened by this sort-of-merger (at least of names, if not registered parties): it eventually won power and kept it for 44 years. But these weren’t really mergers of two parties.
For decades the BC Conservatives affected an ad hoc alliance with the Liberals to counter the socialist Co-operative Commonwealth Federation; when the CCF won more seats than the Conservatives in 1941, the business community urged the two parties formalize the de facto coalition, the governing Liberals acceded to the idea, and an actual merger was sealed. Like the federal and Alberta Conservatives, the BC party adopted the prefix “Progressive” in 1942. Whatever strength it garnered by this merger was tapped-out by 1952 when renegade Conservative MLA, WAC Bennett, won power as leader of the Social Credit party which governed for almost three decades (save for a three-year hiatus under the NDP in the early 70s). Eventually the Conservative and Liberal parties vanished altogether. This is one case when two anti-socialist parties were strengthened by merging.
Preston Manning and Lucien Bouchard smashed Brian Mulroney’s federal PC party—a kind of “merger” between regional conservatives: it was reduced to just two seats in 1993. Manning tried to reunite the right under a new party name, the Canadian Alliance, but failed to win over the rump PC party—which is hardly the merger he was looking for. In 2003 the newly-elected leaders of the CA and PCs, Stephen Harper and Peter MacKay, made a treacherous deal to merge the two parties (which MacKay had promised the PC membership he would never do in return for their leadership support). By 2006 the new CPC was government. But was it really strengthened?
The merged CPC won only a minority in 2006 due almost entirely to the collapse of the Liberal vote —that is, the CPC victory was really by default, not strength. Harper’s first-term government holds the record for the least legislatively-productive parliament in Canadian history. Again it won only a minority in 2008. Finally, in 2011, Harper won the CPC’s first and last majority (this time the Liberal default rewarded the NDP which became Loyal Opposition for the very first time), marking the zenith of CPC popularity at 41% of the popular vote— which steadily diminished in the next three elections. The party has had three leaders since the Liberals won back power in 2015. Although under its current leader, Pierre Poilievre, the CPC is more popular than the governing Liberal minority (backed by the NDP), these popularity surveys, for what they’re worth, are more attributable to hate than love. The next election isn’t until October, 2025, and, even though the electorate is in a hot and bothered mood at the moment, there is no guarantee the CPC with retake power by then. In any case, it seems more likely that if the CPC wins in a year and a half from now, it will be another case of default, not love for the CPC—and probably a minority, too. That party has never been loved: how much strength has the CPC garnered since its merger in 2003?
The partisan right in the ROC+Q is shown in less than flattering light (perhaps Nova Scotia’s PC government is the only exception). Ontario’s Big Blue machine is plagued by scandal; Manitoba’s PCs lost the recent election to the NDP; Quebec’s partisan right, like every party in La Belle Province, sits on an knife-edge, knowing full well what its electorate does when it gets agitated; New Brunswick and Saskatchewan’s parties of the right, both in power, have picked fairly irrelevant but highly contentious issues to run on in their respective election campaigns scheduled for October of this year. It’s arguable that picking a fight over gender issues as both have done are attempts to distract from more important issues, a sign of weakness, not strength. But of course none of these parties is the product of merger.
Rather look to Alberta where Jason Kenney untied the right—an hostile merger if ever there was one— after the NDP won an upset victory that terminated the 44 year-old PC regime in 2015. He went on to win the PC leadership ( still under RCMP investigation) whence he merged the party with the farther-right Wild Rose party to form the Untied Conservative Party. It won power in 2019. Kenney then went on to become the least popular premier in Canada and eventually resigned after getting only 51% approval from the voting membership. Is that strength? The party whose sutures were barely set seems set to tear itself in two between old PC moderates and the radical Take Back Alberta faction. Strength? Danielle Smith won the leadership contest with 53% of voting members, stumbled through gaff after gaff until last spring’s election which the UCP won but but a very thin margin (while the NDP continued to build the largest Loyal Opposition in Alberta history). More Strength? Depends how one counts a few thousand votes in a handful of Calgary ridings.
Seemingly not to be outdone, Smith recently announced highly contentious policy on gender rights for school-aged citizens—something similar to, but more draconian than either Saskatchewan’s or NB’s (Poilievre, prays every night beside his bed that Smith won’t drag him into this mess). Yet, unlike the other two, Smith’s odious move will hardly distract from the other policy announcements which are, almost incredibly, even more unpopular with Albertans.
Just like the merger that created the CPC, the one which shotgun-wedded the UCP looks wobbly, at best. Any party which harbours mutually repelled factions cannot be called ‘strong’—“A house divided…” The merger of the PC and WR parties might have won back-to-back elections, but both were stewed in controversy and Albertans, never mind Canadians, have proved to be less and less friendly to the UCP which, since winning last May, has earned disapproval for most of its major policies. How to spend political capital doesn’t seem to be the merged UCP’s strong point.
Kenney only made it halfway through his first term as UCP leader. How long will Danielle Smith last? Just asking this, quite legitimately, does not indicate UCP strength—quite the opposite in fact. For most politicians, having three and a half years to go before the next election is a blessing, but in Danielle’s case it is a curse.
Does the ProgCon/Wild Rose “merger” —if it could be called that—compare to a potential one between Naheed Nenshi’s Calgary supporters and the NDP? The singular fact is that neither is conservative nor is saddled with extreme factions (although not having socialist bona fides might make Nenshi persona non grata to some Dipper ideologues). In contrast, factions of the right are uncomfortably ligatured together in a bundle of rods and battle axes. What’s that saying about—‘ if you’re a hammer everything looks like a nail’?
We might conclude that, whatever party mergers are worth, they don’t seem to work for parties of the right. Virtually everywhere we look in the Western World, right-wing parties are barely holding their members together while trying to appease dichotomies within their ranks that distrust and dislike each other. Just look at the tRumpublican mess in the USA.
Insofar as parliamentary alliances could be called merger-light, the most successful of those appear to be the Liberal-Dipper alliance in the HoC and the former Green-Dipper alliance in BC.
Nominally “conservative” parties of the right are weakened whatever they do because none of that is what citizens want—a fair society and a healthy environment. All of them (save, maybe, Nova Scotia’s) are nearly falling apart under the strain of factionalism and extremism. The once-powerful BC Liberal party which ruled for 16 years has fallen to just barely north of single-digit popularity since losing the 2017 and 2020 elections; the incumbent NDP government has 99% odds of winning a majority again in October while the long-forgotten BC Conservatives have reappeared, proudly relieved of the weak Liberal faction once allied with one of the farthest-right governments Canada ever had. It’s so bad that the BC Liberals had to change their name and now poll at just 12% while the BC Conservatives ride at an amazing 17%—and, even more amazingly, tied with the Greens. Now that’s a picture of the partisan right falling apart. Step right up, come on in, would you like to see the grand tour?
Perhaps the most strengthening merger ever really was the Canadian Federation of Labour and the CCF. Well, “strength” in a manner of speaking: the NDP has never come close to winning federal power. Perhaps Alberta’s next government will be a de facto merger of Notley “socialists”, Nenshi’s “centrists” and who-knows-who’s erstwhile ProgCons. You just never know, these days.
It would be somewhat, er, funny if both major parties had leaders who didn’t formally meet the qualifications their party set for their leadership races. Yet if Nenshi runs and wins, that is precisely what we’d have.
I’ll add this: If our political parties weren’t so weak, neither Nenshi nor Smith would be permitted to run for leadership. Yet another example of declining institutions that is harming democracy and government.
Another plus for Nenshi is that when he left the city didn't snap back toward the default conservatism in the usual fashion; Jyoti Gondek is a solid progressive.
Played right, his extremely urban political history could be a major advantage, not a disadvantage. He has no history to fight against. It leaves him free to make promises and policies without having to worry about past positions.
Give the farmers and rural communities anything (economic) they want. His urban base certainly doesn’t care if he does. He could run separate urban/rural campaigns in a way that would be very difficult for any other candidate.