Nenshi Has Wanted to Run in Edmonton. Notley Just Made It Possible

Alberta NDP Leader Naheed Nenshi is about to make headlines again.

After languishing for the past six months in the role of Opposition leader without a legislative seat, Nenshi appears poised to run in a yet-to-be called byelection in Edmonton-Strathcona.

Yes, that’s the seat held by former NDP leader Rachel Notley who announced this morning she’d resign her seat Dec. 30.

No, as I write this Nenshi has not confirmed he will run to succeed Notley. But it’s just a matter of time.

Nenshi has coyly been suggesting for months he’d be interested in running in Edmonton-Strathcona, one of the safest NDP seats in Alberta. But he didn’t want to be seen trying to push out Notley who has been serving as his key senior advisor.

By running in Notley’s old seat, Nenshi would be filling a vacancy that was bound to come up sooner or later and he wouldn’t need to ask an MLA in Calgary or Edmonton to step down to trigger a byelection.

He’d also be countering the narrative that as a former Calgary mayor he is a stranger to Edmonton.

In a year-end interview for The Tyee last week, Nenshi talked openly about running in the capital city: “I'm certainly willing to look at Edmonton, because I split my time between the two cities, and quite frankly, I think it'd be good for me to learn more about Edmonton.”

During an unrelated news conference Thursday morning, Premier Danielle Smith had little to say about Notley’s retirement and wouldn’t say anything about when she would call a byelection, instead taking a dig at Nenshi for not running in the Dec. 18 byelection in Lethbridge-West.

An Edmonton byelection would be a boost to Nenshi’s profile that all but disappeared after his commanding leadership win last June. After that he slipped into countless anonymous barbecues over the summer to introduce himself to party members, new and old.

He also fell into the pit of silence populated by Opposition politicians everywhere whose voices are reduced to mere whispers against the clamour generated by majority governments.

And, boy, can Alberta’s United Conservative government generate a racket.

To say Premier Danielle Smith “flooded the zone” with news and controversy in 2024 is to say Niagara Falls drips water.

In the past few months alone Smith introduced contentious legislation to, among other things, restrict gender-affirming care for youth, crack down on the use of genders pronouns in schools, ban the use of machines to count votes in municipal elections, and give health-care workers in hospitals the right to refuse to be vaccinated.

She also fired the board of Alberta’s $170-billion Crown corporation, AIMCo, that manages the pensions of 500,000 retired and active public sector employees. And she named former prime minister Stephen Harper as chairman of AIMCo’s board.

“The idea is that if they just put so much stuff out every single day, you're gonna miss the really horrible stuff, right? And so, you know, in the Opposition, you have two strategies, respond to bloody everything, or try to focus on the stuff that really matters,” said Nenshi.

But it is difficult for the Opposition to keep up. The same goes for the ever-shrinking pool of overtaxed journalists covering Alberta politics trying to keep their heads above the flood of news, controversy and chaos generated by what is arguably the most interventionist government in Alberta history.

The pace isn’t likely to slacken in 2025 with the government facing a budget deficit created by its own over-reliance on the price of oil. It has to deal with contract demands from 250,000 public sector workers including nurses and teachers while also fulfilling a promise to build more schools and give Albertans the tax break Smith promised on the first day of last year’s election campaign.

Nenshi suspects Smith will either run a deficit or “massively cut public services.” Neither will be popular.

A looming deficit will be Smith’s next big challenge. For Nenshi, the next challenge is not a byelection in Edmonton-Strathcona but the byelection next week in Lethbridge-West, a riding held by the NDP since 2015. A victory for the New Democrats could be viewed as a public affirmation of Nenshi’s leadership. A defeat would be a calamity.

Nenshi has one last crucial hurdle to clear in 2024 before he can start his plans to get a legislative seat in 2025.