Alberta NDP leader 'optimistic as ever' following by-election win, looking ahead to 2025

Alberta NDP leader Naheed Nenshi discusses a recent by-election win, his plans for getting a seat in the legislature, and his outlook for Alberta’s political landscape with Alberta Primetime host Michael Higgins.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Michael Higgins: Rob Miyashiro has won the Lethbridge-West by-election. The former city councillor finished more than 1,100 votes ahead of the UCP's John Middleton-Hope.

The seat was left vacant by the resignation of MLA Shannon Phillips.

Let’s start right there on Lethbridge-West. What does it mean for your party to win the by election and retain this riding?

Naheed Nenshi: I think there's a whole bunch of things here. Political scientists will tell you that by-elections don't really matter - that they are not really indicative of what's going on. For me, this was very important.

This was a riding that the NDP has held, but was very much seen as a personal riding for Shannon Phillips, who was an extraordinary MLA. So a lot of folks in the pundit autocracy were like, this is Nenshi’s first big test - can he hold this riding outside of the NDP strongholds in Calgary and Edmonton? In reality, what we had here was two things.

The first is, we had a great campaign, terrific volunteers and an extraordinary candidate. I wanted there to be a candidate for Lethbridge-West who believed in Lethbridge, who had public service running through their veins, and that is Rob Miyashiro. He's going to be an excellent MLA.

The second thing is that the UCP threw everything they had at this. They spent untold amounts of money - I wouldn't be surprised if the number starts with million - on pre-writ advertising trying to slam me, really negative advertising.

They had the premier and a whole bunch of her senior cabinet ministers down there making empty promises, and they very cynically arranged the by-election for just before Christmas. Because the University of Lethbridge is in that riding, the students wouldn't be around, and busy families would be too busy to vote. It backfired on them very spectacularly.

Even though they had a terrific candidate, a great public servant in John Middleton-Hope. They lost so badly despite throwing everything at it. If I'm sitting in the premier's office today, I'm probably saying, 'Wow, our messaging is not working beyond our base. Regular people are saying we're failing on health care, we're failing on education, we're failing on jobs, we're failing on public safety, we're failing on cost of living.'

The people of Lethbridge sent a very strong message that they didn't want anything to do with this government.

MH: Former leader Rachel Notley wound down the year signaling her Dec. 30 departure.

I'll put the question to you, when it comes to by-elections, will you or won't you run for that seat in Edmonton-Strathcona?

NN: I've always said that I would look at the next vacancy that comes up in Calgary or in Edmonton, which are the two cities where I pretty much split my time.

These days, it's very attractive to think about how I, as a Calgary guy, could use this as an opportunity to get to know Edmonton much better between now and the federal election.

Ultimately, the decision on my candidacy, or prospective candidacy, is up to the members in Edmonton-Strathcona. Certainly I'm very willing and have started to have conversations with those members about whether that makes sense.

MH: Much of the news cycle at the moment is dominated by Donald Trump's tariff threat and continued reference to Canada being the 51st state.

Then there's all the chaos surrounding the Trudeau government.

Where do you weigh in on Alberta's response here of engaging with U.S. governors and bringing a border security plan to the table?

NN: This is the worst possible time for us to have a federal government that has shown that it's incapable of doing anything, because these tariffs are an existential crisis for Alberta.

If they go through - and there's no reason to believe they won't - the Alberta economy will be devastated. The one and only thing that will prevent us from complete devastation is the fact that Rachel Notley got a pipeline built to Asia to through Vancouver to try to diversify our markets away from the United States.

Now Danielle Smith's strategy of meeting with the governors and stuff is not wrong, but she has to have something credible to say. What's very frustrating to me is that she's gone into these negotiations like the person who shows up at a used car lot and says, 'Oh my God, that's my dream car, take all my money.' You can't do this by giving your opponent their frame, by saying this is all true.

I see that we're putting up some pictures of her at the governor's meetings. What is interesting is not one of those governors posted that they met with her, and these are all pictures at some reception where she asked governors for selfies.

At worst, she's irrelevant. At best, going on Fox News and telling the president he's right and that he's hilarious, and tweeting about how the president is right to ask questions about the trade deficit. That's not how you handle a negotiation like this.

Danielle Smith has always been a deeply unserious politician. She doesn't understand that sometimes hard things are hard, and I'm worried that she's going to take us from irrelevancy to actually doing harm to the cause of Alberta and Canada with her very strange strategy here.

MH: Let's bring it back to our province. The Smith government has presented, as promised, a Green Line alignment plan minus tunneling downtown.

What's to be made of the ball now being in the court of Calgary city council?

NN: I think the Calgary city council threw it right back at the province by pointing out that the new alignment, what I call the 'Danielle-Devin disaster,' is something that has been studied to death by the world's best experts.

That the report that they have released, at least the parts that are not redacted, do not in fact, recommend this. This not only serves fewer people, it turns off north Calgary forever from the Green Line, and guess what? It costs more than the tunnel.

I'm not surprised by this, because we already did this analysis. The elevated line was actually what I wanted in the hopes that it would be cheaper. Eventually city council turned that down because the analysis showed it to be more expensive.

It's technically very difficult to build. It destroys property values and reduces property taxes. You have to come up with a very difficult technical decision for the Calgary viewers, to get yourself through the city centre parkade and either through or up and over to very busy plus-15 sky bridges that link the major shopping areas downtown.

We've always known it wasn't going to work. So really, it is time for the province to take the L on this - to understand that all this chaos they caused was not only counterproductive, but actually caused a worse solution.

It's time for them to sit down with city council and get the Green Line, as they say, back on track.

MH: One last question for you. After six months of Alberta NDP leadership and observing from the sidelines the fall sitting, what's your key takeaway about Alberta's political landscape?

NN: I was on one of these interviews recently and somebody played a clip of my speech on June 22 and I was like, 'Wow, that guy sounds so optimistic and not at all jaded.' After six months of seeing this government up close, I am a little jaded.

But what is interesting is that I've been sitting up there with all the school kids on field trips to the legislature, a lot of Grade 6 kids, and they're always so disappointed in their UCP government and how they act. It is true that we have a government that is fundamentally uninterested in being a government. They just think they're a political movement that wants to score political points, and they're not acting on health care, on education, on affordability, on jobs, on public safety.

At the same time, I'm still optimistic. I get to look out at my 38 colleagues and see how amazing the NDP caucus is, and experience and passion and commitment and love for Alberta. I feel the same way. So maybe a little jaded with a little bit of experience, but as optimistic as ever as we go into 2025.