Five people are running to be Rachel Notley's replacement as leader of the Alberta NDP.
At a meet-and-greet in Edmonton on April 9th, they presented themselves and pushed their message, hoping to find favour from the audience of about 200 party members.
Their speeches outlined the serious problems facing this province, and the challenges make quite a list.
Jodi Calahoo Stonehouse, MLA for Edmonton-Rutherford, shared with the audience how the life she had known as a child in the bush and on trap lines has changed over her lifetime. Many rural communities formerly located in pristine rustic settings now suffer from upstream pollution, and residents there suffer from health issues caused by that pollution. She outlined how the future, coming as soon as this spring, is likely to be quite challenging for Alberta due to hot weather and drought conditions. She pointed out that water is not only critical for plants, forests and farms but also for industrial operations, cities and the electrical grid. Without proper allocation of water, important supports for our population and our economy may be unsustainable.
Gil McGowan, president since 2004 of Alberta's largest labour organization, the Alberta Federation of Labour, specified how the NDP needed to win support from Alberta worker voters if it is to win in the future. He said of all the candidates, he had the best understanding of labour issues. The NDP, he said, needs to be the best it can be because only it could steer the province through the problems facing it. His refrain of "Save the party, Save the province" evoked a positive response from the assembled members.
Sarah Hoffman, whose credentials include former cabinet minister and deputy premier in Notley's four-year government and MLA for Edmonton-Glenora since 2015, outlined her three-pronged approach - "Health, Climate and Housing." She pointed to her record - public healthcare was well-supported when she was Minister of Health during the NDP government's time in power between 2015 and 2019.
Kathleen Ganley, like Hoffman, was a cabinet minister in the Notley government. She has been MLA for Calgary-Mountain View since 2015. A trained lawyer, Rachel asked her to run to be MLA in 2015 and although apprehensive that it might kill her career, she agreed. Upon election Notley chose her to be Minister of Justice. At the April 9th meeting, she boasted that she and others of the government raised the minimum wage, supported human rights -- and legalized pot.
Millwoods readers will be proud to know that Edmonton-Millwoods MLA Christina Gray was Minister of Labour when the government raised the minimum wage from a trifling $10 an hour to $15, a level it is still at years later under UCP rule. Ganley has said she would increase the minimum wage to $17 an hour by 2027 and then tie it to inflation.
Meanwhile she also is calling for income below $26,000 to be immune from Alberta income tax, which will produce savings for more than a million people. She said she is inviting all interested people to add their dreams to her dream - "to grow the party, build an economy that works for people and win government in 2027."
Naheed Nenshi, former mayor of Calgary, is also a candidate for the NDP leadership. He was unable to attend due to family circumstances. In a pre-recorded video talk, Nenshi called for the NDP to be a party “for all of us,” not to be against Liberal party members or others. He has called for the Alberta NDP to separate itself from the federal NDP, whose policies are not to the liking of many Albertans. However as an old-time NDP-er, I wonder if Nenshi as leader would move the party to those who hitherto held themselves apart from the party, instead of extending a welcome to new arrivals who are now prepared to accept the party's policies as is.
The NDP's popularity has grown considerably since 2012, when it came in fourth with 127,000 votes, 10 percent of votes cast. In that election it elected just four MLAs, although proportionately due about 9.
In the election last year, it received almost 800,000 votes, 44 percent of votes cast. It elected 38 MLAs, about its due share of seats. Under our out-of-date voting system, NDP voters outside the large cities were almost universally denied representation, while the NDP received all the Edmonton seats, denying representation to the third of city voters who voted Conservative. The two disproportional regional results balanced out but left hundreds of thousands of voters without a MLA to call their own.
The 800,000 votes the NDP received last year would have been a majority of the vote in 2015 and 2019, more votes than all the other parties put together. But since then voter turnout has grown to 1.8M and the UCP has concentrated the right-wing vote into just one party. Still in 2023, NDP took just 150,000 fewer votes than the UCP. This is a small difference in a province where 1.8M people cast votes and 1.2M eligible voters stay home.
Seeing these figures, my take-away is, if the NDP vote stays as popular as it is and the UCP suffers a dip in support or breaks up into two parties, the NDP could easily attain power once more.
My hope is that such a NDP government would support the policies of Jagmeet Singh's federal NDP -- enlargement of public healthcare, pharmacare and dental care; taxes on the use of fossil fuels as a way to help fight human-caused climate change; and strong national programs. The Canadian Pension Plan is important for financial security for seniors, for example.
It is interesting to note that sovereignty concerns pursued by the UCP government were not mentioned at the April 9th meeting. No candidate mentioned the carbon tax, the UCP-perceived need for an Alberta pension plan, or the UCP's claim that Alberta pays money into an equalization fund from which it gets no return. This claim, by the way, is without merit - the Alberta government sends very little money to the federal government. Money does flow the other way - federal taxes paid by Alberta taxpayers do return to Alberta through federal spending. Recently the UCP government in fact has put forward a law to prevent the federal government from sending money to Alberta cities without provincial permission. So Alberta does get federal money - a flow the UCP seems set on trying to dry up.
Perhaps it is best to be like the candidates and try to simply ignore the government's confused behaviour at this time. Perhaps we should cross our fingers and hope Alberta survives the coming wildfires and drought; that workers can live on their dwindling paycheques; that seniors do not lose their pensions to an irresponsible Alberta pension plan project.
And that we can all hang in there until the next election. At that time, whoever is chosen to lead the NDP in June will hopefully take the post of premier of this province and lead the way in repairing and building relationships with Nature, the rest of Canada and among ourselves.
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(originally published in Millwoods Mosaic, April 2024)
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no candidate spoke about electoral reform at that night's event, even though only through that kind of reform will the representation we elect truly reflect the way votes are cast.
Sarah Hoffman said when asked one-on-one about it that she was more worried about the rural-ruban disparty - it takes much fewer votes to elect a rural member than an urban member, thus I took it that she thought that left-wing voters in the cities are under represented compared to conservative voters in farm areas.
Investigation of the way districts are set though shows me that two of the most-populous districts in Alberta are outside Edmonton and Calgary, so, not fair to say, all rural districts hold relatively few residents or voters.
and simple calculation shows that the percentage of Alberta residents that live in Edmonton are due about the same number of seats Edmonton has in the legislature, and same for Calgary,
so no under-represention of city voters.
and anyway when a member in one district can be elected with only 25 percent of the vote or less, while elsewhere 70 percent of the votes cast or more elect the winner, it is easy to see that the results of the present election system are filled with anomalies and unfairness.
we need PR
- as simple as multiple-member districts with each voter having just one vote.
and making that vote be transferable (STV) --
then you would have an efficient, simple election system that would produce local representation and a high percentage of effective votes - votes actually used to elect someone, with each party in each district getting about its due share of seats.
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