The Alberta New Democratic Party (ANDP) leadership election ended in a landslide victory for Naheed Nenshi, the former Mayor of Calgary. Nenshi got 86 per cent of the votes cast, more than ten times the next runner up. After shifting to the right for years, Nenshi’s election represents a shift in the direction of transforming the NDP into an openly bourgeois party similar to the Liberals.
Who is Nenshi?
Naheed Nenshi is a bourgeois politician who would normally not be found anywhere near the NDP. He is a Harvard-educated business professor to the right of every ANDP leader in the party’s history. He is known for snippets like “I don’t believe in traditional left-wing, right-wing scales,” and his purple neckties; purple representing a mix of liberal red and Tory blue.
As mayor of Calgary, Nenshi waffled on the $15 minimum wage. During that time, he described himself as a “fiscal conservative” and appealed to the UCP government to let the city break collective bargaining agreements while privatizing public services.
When the leadership race concluded, Danielle Smith, the United Conservative Party (UCP) Premier was quick to attack the new leader, “He’s got no ideas”. In this regard, Smith has a point. Nenshi spent the leadership race praising Rachel Notley, talking about recruiting more people to the party, and speaking in platitudes.
His campaign slogan was “For all of us,” reminiscent of the slogan “For Everyone” used by Justin Trudeau in 2021. Nenshi uses the words “political” and “ideological” as a pejorative; as if to say he is neither ideological nor political. Nenshi does not have any ideas, other than whatever popular liberal ideas are being pedaled at the time.
Where will Nenshi take the party?
The main arguments from members of the ANDP for Nenshi is that he’s won in Calgary, where the party has historically been weak, he’s palatable to more right-wing voters, and that he will win because he’s popular. More precisely, among ANDP members, he’s popular because they think he can win.
In order to defeat the UCP, Nenshi aims to build the Alberta NDP into a broad anti-UCP coalition.
As he explained during the leadership race: “I want federal NDP voters and Liberal voters and Green voters and PPC voters and Conservative voters to all feel like the Alberta NDP is still a home for them provincially, and one way of doing that might be to ensure in our party that we are truly independent.”
In order to attract supporters of all stripes into the NDP, Nenshi sees severing the link between the federal and provincial NDP as a solution. Nenshi explained that: “I think tying us to people whose values we might not entirely share, that we don’t have control over, costs more than it benefits.”
If Nenshi carries out a rightward split from the federal NDP, next we can expect a name change, and eventually the final domino, the party cutting ties with organized labour. This would in effect kill the Alberta NDP as a labour party, turning it into just another bourgeois party.
Lie in the bed you made
The old guard of the NDP have pushed back against this idea including Notley herself who called this idea “Silly, superficial, shortsighted.” Sarah Hoffman, a member of the legislature in Edmonton also opposed this, stating “You’re not going to get some repackaged Liberal Party.” But the election of Nenshi is just a big step in a process that has been going on for a long time and people like Notley and Hoffman have paved the way for Nenshi.
Ever since the foundation of the NDP in the 1960s, there has been an internal struggle within the party. While the base of the party was connected to the unions and social movements, the parliamentary wing of the party bent to pressures to make the party more palatable for the bourgeoisie. Following this trajectory, the Federal NDP abandoned their commitment to socialism in 2013 under Thomas Mulcair.
In Alberta, when the NDP took power in 2015, they capitulated to the ruling class. They backed off on their promise to review the oil royalties and implemented austerity policies, including a public sector wage freeze. They abandoned any meaningful promises and tried to prove that they would be the best managers of capitalism. Even in 2015 Notley talked about “ruling for all Albertans”. Whenever a politician says “ruling for all of the people”, this means “ruling for the ruling class”.
Notley and co. learned the wrong lesson from this experience; that they needed to double down, bend over backwards even further to prove to the bourgeoisie that they were their friends. She launched her 2023 election campaign at the Calgary Chamber of Commerce, the central office of Alberta’s bourgeoisie. All of the NDP’s main platform points focused on the needs of the ruling class, and creating a safe environment for business and investment. NDP candidates with day jobs like nurse or teacher, have retired and been replaced with former Directors of Human Resources for Suncor, lawyers at employer friendly firm McLennan Ross, and landlords.
Nenshi is walking into an environment that has been ready-made for him.
This is where class collaboration leads you. With the capitalist system in crisis all over the world, the bourgeoisie are not interested in collaboration unless you are capitulating.
The Marxists of the RCP reject this path which only leads to defeats and lower living conditions. We work to urgently build a revolutionary alternative and argue for class struggle against the bourgeoisie, not class collaboration.
